All digital content is going on-chain

To fully appreciate this view, consider that we seldom own anything on the internet today: we license ebooks from Amazon, we rent music plays from Apple Music, and we make payments to borrow domains from a registrar for a little while. Even when we create our own content, the rights to it are often owned by the content platform, distributor, or lab... See more

NFTs are intellectual property rights to digital content

But we shouldn’t think of NFTs as tokenized digital content itself. A core insight is that NFTs are much better understood as encapsulating intellectual property rights to the assets they describe.

NFTs [1] are not just cat pictures that people trade on blockchains. Today digital art [2], collectibles [3], and in-game assets [4] are the most visible use cases for these nifty non-fungibles. But the market holds an inconspicuous secret: there is a staggering diversity of online digital content that can be placed on a blockchain in the form of N... See more

Blockchains and NFTs will change this state of affairs dramatically. First, they will digitize the rights to digital content in the form of blockchain assets. Second, they will allow for the assets to be placed on secondary markets. Thus, we can view NFTs as liquid intellectual property (“liquid IP”) for all forms of digital content, a marketplace ... See more

In the future, purchasing an NFT will entitle the owner to certain rights related to its content: the right to own and keep; the right to sell, license, and lend; as well as the right to royalties, the right to confer reuse (i.e. “movie rights”), and so on. That’s why taking a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not the same as actually owning Leonardo ... See more

Over time, we think cryptonative monetization and the core value propositions of crypto networks implemented by Rarible will make it highly competitive with other digital marketplaces and Rarible will be a premiere venue for NFT liquidity.

Tokenization creates new ways of working with IP that were previously unavailable or too expensive to set up. For example, blockchain technology will automate IP provenance, use tracking, and rights management. Using existing standards and smart contracts, NFTs can be fractionalized, co-owned, and governed by multiple users or communities. Fraction... See more

If NFTs are liquid IP, then holders will eventually own the property’s cash flows. This fact makes non-fungible tokens a financial asset class.