Have you ever heard of vIRL NFTs?
What is a vIRL NFT?
Last week, I wrote a post called What is an NFT?
The purpose was to get back to the roots of, well, what an NFT actually is. There's a lot of noise in the space and if you're new it can be very intimidating. A lot of people new to the NFT space get involved literally to try and buy an NFT to sell it at a higher price. They mint this random, over-hyped, and useless JPEG like one of the one you see in the graphic above hoping to get rich.
There's nothing at all wrong with buying an asset to hold and hope to sell it later. The problems come in when you have someone that has literally never even seen an NFT gets roped into spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on an NFT and getting scammed or dumped on.
I feel like I went a little off subject - but just read the post I linked above if you want a sort of noob guide to NFTs. This one is more focused on one of the many use-cases for NFTs that are more than just digital art. We're talking about vIRL NFTs.
Virtual In Real Life Non-Fungible Tokens
I know, that's a mouthful. That's why we use the abbreviation vIRL NFTs instead. So now that you've hopefully watched the above video, you have a general idea of what this actually is. To keep it simple, a vIRL NFT is an NFT on the WAX blockchain (or whatever blockchain might support it) that is linked to a physical item that can be redeemed at any point in time.
There are a lot of advantages to offer this kind of option to your customers. Picture this - There's a new pair of shoes (or game or whatever collectible) that's limited in supply and it drops at some crazy hour so you have to physically be at the store to purchase it. Your car breaks down on the way there or something else ridiculous happens. You miss out on the drop and are super bummed out.
vIRL NFTs solves this and may other problems. If said pair of shoes was tied to a vIRL NFT instead of you physically having to go to the store to wait for the drop, you could buy the NFT from the comfort of your home. Now that you have you NFT, you're free to use it to speculate on the price of the shoes just like you would a regular pair of Yeezys.
The NFT is the physical item essentially, because it can be redeemed for the physical item at any point in time.
I've personally dealt with the nightmare that is selling high dollar collectibles online. Shipping is the biggest problem, realistically. You're mailing a $1000 item across the country (or countries) and you have to trust the large amount of hands that deal with that package. Things get lost in shipping, things get stolen, and things get damaged. None of which are fun, but they all happen more than you would expect on a daily basis.
vIRL NFTs eliminate the need for shipping, which also eliminates the shipping cost. You could save shit tons of money especially if you're an online seller doing a lot of shipping. No more shipping cost and no more dealing with shipping issues. You know what else? No more storage of the physical item unless you choose to do so. Storing phyiscal collectibles can come with its own issues.
If you're a high volume collectibles reseller, you have to worry about having space to store those collectibles where they won't get damaged. We all know that in real life there are things that want to damage your shit all the time like gravity, the elements, or really anything. Hell, even bugs and animals wanna wreck your stuff for some reason lol. You could hold 10,000 or even 100,000 vIRL collectibles in your wallet without ever having to rent a space or provide storage for them.
Getting the picture now? Imagine being able to check the blockchain and see that an item is 100% genuine. Scan the QR code or type the serial number for that item in and via the actual NFT of the physical item on the blockchain. No more fake Yeezys, sorry bud. The cool thing about this is that it's already being utilized and is proving successful.
In order to process insane amounts of transactions without paying fees, you need a cheap and scalable blockchain. WAX blockchain delivers that. Zero fees and instant transactions. Plus it's carbon neutral. WAX put a heavy focus on vIRL NFTs at one point and vIRL Funko Pops became very popular. Now companies like StockX, known for being the stock exchange of sneakers, is doing something with shoes that work in a similar fashion.
The possibilities with NFTs are limitless. We just have to see how far people are willing to go past just stupid JPEGS.
Post written by: @l337m45732 aka NiftyPhill