Venture capitalist Bill Tai predicts that company stock and real estate will be among the many assets that become non-fungible tokens in the future. CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal spoke with the tech investor on Wednesday and he assured him that “it’s going to happen” and that “not even a question” had been asked.
Tai said at the Crypto Finance Conference in St. Moritz:
- Switzerland, that it is simply a matter of when it will happen at a large scale.
In the digital world, NFTs are unique assets that can be traded online. Using them, you can prove who owns a particular digital asset, such as a photograph, video, or even a collection of sports trading cards. Anyone who owns an NFT of a stock has no idea what they can do with it right now. There has been a significant increase in the number of items being converted into NFTs over the past year. Everything from the origins of the internet to the first tweet by Jack Dorsey has been traded as NFTs.
The selling price of these intangible assets has baffled some, however.
At Christie’s auction in March, South Carolina-based graphic designer Beeple sold an NFT for a record $69 million. For $5.4 million in June, an NFT of the web’s source code was sold. The popularity of NFT as a speculative crypto-asset is evident in new data released by market tracker DappRadar on Tuesday. NFTs have been sold by well-known brands like Coca-Cola and Gucci.
What are NFTs, and how are they used?
Tai, who has invested in start-ups like Zoom and Scribd, says he expects more and more things to be turned into NFTs as the internet moves from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. It was read-only, as he put it. Read-write code is the new standard in Web 2.0. Everything that enters and exits the screen will be encapsulated in a wrapper in Web 3.0. It’s a web of assets, then.
Everything can have an address so that people can find it in a marketplace.
“You can put land titles on there, real estate, art, drawings,” he said, explaining that everything has an address so that people can find them. In the long run, this is the most efficient method for transferring ownership of any asset. Tai, like many other proponents of NFT, is intrigued by the concept of cryptocurrencies. A “yet another wobble” has occurred, he said, but he’s confident that the price of bitcoin will rise again. On Monday, the digital currency’s value dropped to less than $40,000.
In an interview with CNBC, he said, “I don’t know when it’s going to go back up, but it’s going to go back up.”
More institutional investors are getting on board with bitcoin, and its value could nearly double this year, according to the CEO of Seba Bank. The head of a regulated Swiss bank that specialises in cryptocurrencies said, “Our internal valuation models indicate a price right now between $50,000 and $75,000.” As far as I am concerned, that is exactly where we will be. Timing is always an issue,” he says.