PART I: THE NEXT DIGITAL REVOLUTION

NFTs make it possible to create an effectively infallible record of who owns what in digital space.

Provable digital ownership through NFTs allows practically any company to unlock previously unattainable brand value. They can issue digital goods that provide real value to the customer, whether it’s through access to special events, discounts on their products, or even just simple, shareable digital collectibles. Companies of any size, and even individual creators, can now make digital goods easily, without spending a tremendous amount of time and money in the process. Moreover, these goods don’t have to be tethered to any individual platform, and that expands their value by giving consumers the opportunity to use them flexibly across the internet. NFTs have simultaneously improved the value proposition of digital goods for both the creator making them and the consumer purchasing them.

The trick is precisely that these tokens aren’t a dime a dozen—they’re not random, arbitrary bits. Rather, each NFT is an individually distinct digital record, which can be linked to other assets or product features, and whose owner(s) can be consistently identified.

The term non-fungible token literally means what it says. Something is fungible when you can exchange one unit for another without a second thought. Dollar bills are fungible; so are grains of rice—for practical purposes, every one of them is just like any other. By contrast, each NFT is unique, just like in a litter of puppies. This makes them non-fungible—you generally wouldn’t trade your puppy for another one! (The word token in context basically just means a digital object that a given user or account can have control over.)

An NFT serves as a sort of digital deed—a record of ownership that can be passed from one person to another. Often, we associate such records with other assets, just like we associate a physical deed with land or a car, or a marriage certificate with proof of nuptials. In that case, by convention (or sometimes by contract), holding the NFT represents ownership of the associated asset and whatever rights owners receive.

Why do that? First off, just like with deeds for land, using NFTs can simplify trading in an asset that is costly (or impossible) to move. Moreover, and more powerfully, we can use NFTs to establish property rights over assets for which ownership would otherwise be difficult to certify, or even define—as with the case of digital art described above. NFTs do this easily and seamlessly.

Markets can’t exist without property rights. Conversely, when we gain a richer or easier-to-use way to create property rights, we can enable new types of markets. Once we start thinking about NFTs this way, applications jump out immediately—of course the now-ubiquitous use of NFTs in establishing property rights and creating markets for digital images and media, but also anything else that can be encoded as data.

While the specific problem NFTs solve is providing infallible proof of digital ownership, at their core, NFTs are software. And just as we can build extensions on top of web browsers like Google Chrome to introduce new features, or use mods to add new items and world maps to video games like Minecraft, both creators and third parties can build on top of NFTs. This sort of composability has been the foundation of the internet and many of the most successful software movements in history—and NFTs generalize it to nearly every category of product.

We’ve identified five core principles of successful NFT projects that apply across contexts and industries and put them together into a model we’re calling The NFT Staircase. Here they are:

• Ownership: NFTs provide a verifiable and secure record of who owns what, typically complete with a full history of provenance.

• Utility: NFTs can also provide direct benefits to ownership, such as entry to a music festival or access to exclusive merchandise. This sort of use value creates a direct reason to want to own an NFT in the first place.

• Identity: NFTs offer functional utility, but people sometimes form connections with digital assets on a more personal level. They might display the image associated to an NFT on their social media feed, for example, or print it out and put it on their wall. Plus NFT ownership is often to some degree public by default—and so acquiring an NFT is frequently an act of affiliation with the brand that created it, just like wearing a branded T-shirt.

• Community: Once an NFT becomes part of one’s identity, there is a natural opportunity for it to become something bigger. The resulting community is somewhat akin to a fandom: holders of a given NFT have shared goals and interests to connect over, just as Star Wars or New England Patriots fans always have something to talk about.

• Evolution: An engaged community can then drive further utility creation and expansion in a way that builds upon the NFTs in a continual value loop, creating value for holders and the brand in tandem.

The idea of Web3 is that we can fundamentally disrupt the way business works by giving individuals a greater degree of ownership over their data and other digital assets. This gives people more control of their experience online, and at the same time it gives them a share of the pie—which incentivizes both users and platforms to invest in making the experience better for everyone. It’s bringing consumers and their favorite brands closer than ever before in a way that creates more value for all involved.

From the perspective of the individual, the three eras of the internet can be summarized as follows: In Web 1, you’re the consumer: You travel across the web, ingesting information and participating in e-commerce. In Web 2, you’re the product: It’s well documented that most social media platforms and phone apps are free because they, at the very least, use your engagement to show you targeted advertising—and some of them even sell access to your information, as well. (As the old phrase goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you probably are the product!) Even so, because social media is habit-forming, users generate the vast majority of the content for free. In Web3, you’re part of the brand: This is the key distinction Web3 brings: Through digital ownership, individuals are simultaneously consumers, active participants, and, to some degree, owners and investors. The same digital assets you use to flex your enthusiasm for your favorite brands also give you a stake in their success (and give the brand a stake in your success), because when the brand does better, your brand assets and affiliation can increase in value.

PART II: ASCENDING THE STAIRCASE

Establishing Ownership

When you hold an NFT, it resides in a software application that you control—often called a wallet. The key word here is control. This may not sound like a big shift; however, historically, digital goods have typically been controlled by the platforms on which they were created.

Owning a physical asset typically comes with the right to use whatever features it has, as well as the ability to bring it with you as you move from place to place. Digital ownership with NFTs is the same way—you have direct access to the asset, can bring it with you to any platform, and can use it however you want within the constraints of its design.

At any given moment, product features or terms of service can change in ways you really dislike, and there’s not much you can do about it. Web3 changes that by giving people personal ownership over their data and other digital assets—and sometimes even a direct stake in the platform’s governance or output. This better aligns platforms’ and users’ incentives, and moreover gives users the ability to vote with their feet. In Web3, if you’re mistreated by a platform, or even just prefer a competing platform’s features, you can move your digital assets over. (Compared to the locked-in experience of Web 2 platforms, that degree of frictionlessness can be hard to imagine—but in Web3, it’s true. To use any given NFT trading platform, for example, you just log in with your digital wallet, and the NFTs you hold are populated and available for trading immediately.)

But again, why share ownership in this way? The bet in Web3 is that when users become personally invested in the success of a platform, they’ll engage in ways that make the long-term value greater for everyone. This isn’t a new concept; similar reasoning explains why some companies give employees an equity stake, for example. The Web3 model extends this idea to include consumers: platforms and brands share ownership with consumers in order to incentivize them to engage in ways that help grow the overall pie—for example, contributing ideas, creating content, or recruiting other users. Meanwhile, when the platform’s incentives are more closely aligned with the users’, those users might actually be more willing to join in the first place.

With a physical good, it’s virtually automatic that the person who owns the good gets to control its function. But blockchains are the only technology we know of that enables that same sort of user control and synchrony of assets across digital space. (Plus blockchains also enable digital goods’ creators to commit to those goods having specific features and functionalities by embedding them in source code that can’t be changed.)

In addition to changing the direct incentives around investing in an asset and brand, the degree of control NFTs provide gives holders a greater sense of psychological ownership. Research shows that people are more likely to form attachments to things they feel like they actually own and control. The sense of ownership people get from NFTs is both psychological and functional, and these build on and reinforce each other. And that again feeds back into holders’ willingness to invest time and energy into the brand.

One’s digital wallet can function as a sort of profile, similar to Facebook or LinkedIn. But unlike Web 2 profiles, decentralized identities are backed by hard evidence: a permanent, timestamped record of a person’s accomplishments, contributions, interests, and activities to date. Furthermore, a digital wallet is a single, unified identity—there isn’t cross-platform siloing like there is in Web 2, where, for example, one’s LinkedIn identity and reputation are fundamentally separate from Facebook. Thus Web3 has the potential to enable people “to carry their full selves with them as they traverse cyberspace: their affinities and experiences reflected by what they’ve created, contributed to, earned, and owned online, no matter the specific platform.” Indeed, one of the simplest yet surprisingly valuable applications of NFTs is to use them to record and memorialize events and experiences. In this context, NFTs become like digital badges or stickers—they signify “I was here” or “I did this.” People collect them in their digital wallets in scrapbook-like logs, and can both review them for their own reference and share them with others. At the time of this writing, the leading way to do this was through the Proof of Attendance Protocol (POAP), which provides a lightweight way to create these digital stickers and give them out for free.

Equally crucially, most NFTs are designed to interoperate, which means they can be used with many different platforms—rather than just the one that created them. If you buy a bunch of physical trading cards, you can trade them for other types of cards, or even other assets like cool sunglasses or a xylophone. You can make up your own games with them and teach your friends. And if you want to sell them, you can typically do that in any store. All of this can happen without the creator’s knowledge, much less their permission. Most NFTs work the same way. They can be used flexibly across platforms—you can use an NFT you own to display an associated image on Twitter and in a virtual gallery, and if you wanted to, someone could even develop a video game based around it. All of this can happen without permission—unlike with Web 2 digital assets, which tend to be heavily restricted by platform policies and APIs.

Enhancing Ownership with Utility

We would argue that pretty much any NFT—yes, even just a token associated to an image—can add utility to help move its way up the NFT Staircase. While some industries require a bit more creativity, oftentimes it’s easy to think of ways to build in value. It can be as simple as a holder rewards program or as complex as a multifaceted governance and profit-sharing model, but there’s almost always a way to use NFTs to engage customers in a meaningful way and keep them in your business’s ecosystem.

Utility is any functional benefit that comes from owning a given NFT. Abstracting and oversimplifying tremendously, utility means: NFTs can do things themselves; they can enable you to do things; and/or they can give you things.

As of this writing, NFTs often offered benefits in a few recurring categories: experiences, such as admission to exclusive concerts featuring legendary artists (Bored Ape Yacht Club) and high-end conferences with top-tier speakers and media personalities (VeeFriends); opportunities, such as the chance to vote on the allocation of charitable donations (OnChainMonkey), influence characters and key plot points in a Neil Strauss novel (Jenkins the Valet), and even receive special access to driving tracks (Porsche); intellectual property, such as the right to use NFT imagery in one’s own commercial ventures and to license them for use in everything from pinball machines to feature films (Bored Ape Yacht Club, Azuki, and SupDucks), and use various audio samples in one’s own music compositions (Arpeggi); discounts, such as free or reduced-rate access to paywalled media (Knights of Degen), or across-the-board price reductions on company products (Bugatti Group); digital goods, such as add-on NFTs to wear in the metaverse (Adidas), and avatars to use in online games (The Sandbox); physical goods, such as the chance to acquire exclusive apparel (Nike/RTFKT and Tiffany & Co.), figurines (the littles, Thingdoms), and tumblers (Starbucks).

When it comes to direct and singular functional utility from using a given digital asset, NFTs aren’t that different from other types of assets. Lawn mowers, for example, have default utility: You can use them to mow your lawn (and that’s a big part of the value of owning a lawn mower!). Additive utility builds on top of core assets, and NFTs have a special advantage because they make it easy to identify and verify who owns them.

One particularly common mechanism used to deliver NFT utility is what’s referred to colloquially as an airdrop, in which new NFTs or other assets are delivered to the holders of a given NFT through a process kind of like email or direct deposit. By looking at blockchain records, it’s possible to see who (or rather, which account) owns a given NFT, and send them something additional. (There’s also a lighter-weight version where instead of direct-depositing the new digital asset, you give holders the right to claim it through a software process the user themselves have to trigger. For all intents and purposes, that’s the same—except that using a claim system selects for the holders who are paying attention to what’s going on.)

The NFTs you hold in your digital wallet can impact where you can go and what you can see by way of a mechanism referred to as token-gating. In essence, the digital assets you own can provide you with entry to exclusive areas or activities, both online and offline.

Some NFTs grant their holders intellectual property rights to associated images or other media assets. This means that in addition to being able to display the images, NFT holders can potentially profit from their use. Someone can start a business with NFT imagery as the logo, license it into a book or television show, or create and sell clothing based around it.

When it comes to third-party utility, NFTs are especially powerful. Businesses can assess the culture of an NFT holder base—and if it aligns with their target market, they can likely get qualified customers at a higher rate than other marketing efforts. It’s a concept we’re calling verified member benefits, and it’s something the blockchain is uniquely well equipped to do. An NFT owner can connect their digital wallet to a company’s site, and that company can provide utility without even necessarily getting permission from the creator of the NFT.

You could build multi-threaded subscriptions for pretty much any topic of interest—maybe subscribing to Science also gets you access to all the microbiology articles in various other journals. Or imagine if you could buy an all-access pass to Star Wars news across newspapers and magazines worldwide. It’s possible that these sorts of customized content products would be so valuable to many buyers relative to subscriptions to individual publications that they would raise total readership and revenue overall. And of course, with people building deeply personalized internet content flows that better reflect their interests and identity, there are opportunities for communities to form around the associated digital assets—but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Building and Reinforcing Identity

NFTs enable uniquely strong affinities and can strengthen people’s connections to the things they already love.

While in Web 2 everyone has to leave their photos and other information behind when they switch platforms, in Web3 people have the option of bringing their data with them as they travel around the internet. Instead of having a copy of an image on Twitter and another copy on Instagram, a person can have a master copy of that image—associated with an NFT in their digital wallet—which Twitter, Instagram, and any other site can read and display. This is likely to lead to more competition among tech platforms, both because it makes it harder to lock in users and because it means new entrants can bootstrap off of existing content and information networks. And indeed, even in the early days of Web3, we’ve already seen significant entry and experimentation by new platforms like Bluesky, Farcaster, and Lens creating interoperable social media protocols and providing ways for users to leverage their data that’s already stored publicly on blockchains. But even more importantly, the shift means that users will mostly be building a core digital identity—reflected in their digital wallet—rather than individual, platform-specific identity shards. These new core identities will enable people to establish more complete digital representations of themselves than before. And with a greater degree of both psychological and literal control over how their digital identities are used, it’s also likely people will invest more effort in building them.

All of this means that even the type of firm that doesn’t normally think of itself as digitally native is going to have to think about NFTs. Why? Because they want to be part of their customers’ digital identities. In a Web 1 world, you competed to have consumers sign up for your email list. In a Web 2 world, you drove them to your social media sites to engage with your brand. In a Web3 world, you have to be part of your customers’ digital wallets. If you’re not, someone else is probably going to crowd you out. And conversely, if you do become part of your customers’ digital identities, they’ll become more attached to your brand, and evangelize it all over the web.

As we’ve already mentioned, the most successful businesses in Web 2 are built on powerful network effects—they have massive user bases and data repositories, so the value proposition for each new user grows as a function of how large the platform already is. There’s a network effect in Web3, too, but instead of accruing to the platform, it accrues to the assets. An NFT community gets more valuable the more people are in it and the more deeply those people engage. In a world where people bring their assets from platform to platform, it matters less which platforms they are active on, and more which assets they like to use.

Network effects center on community cohesion: the more value a group of people sees in a given digital asset—and the more value that community itself creates—the more other people want to own the asset, growing the community further.

Connecting the Community

Community formation around shared interests has been happening forever, of course. But NFTs turn it up to eleven because of what we call their embedded network superpower: As we’ve said, becoming the owner of an NFT is to some degree an act of affiliation with the brand. Yet NFT ownership doesn’t just connect you with the brand itself, but also with the entire network of individuals who are similarly affiliated. Remember that with NFTs, the network effect accrues to the asset. The quasi-converse is that the network is embedded in the asset itself. The holders of a given NFT comprise a network of brand enthusiasts just waiting to be activated. And pretty much anyone can start the community activation process.

The brand is incentivized to increase the utility and underlying brand value for NFT holders, not just to sell more products, but to drive the pride of ownership and a sense of identity. The community is incentivized to be active participants in the brand because their efforts also may raise the value of the NFTs they own. It’s a system where everyone wins together. Taken to the limit, this is leading to entirely new models of brand-building, which borrow conceptually from the open-source software movement.

NFTs make it possible for people to find their tribes everywhere. That’s because they give people ways to show their affinities and affiliations publicly, whether by way of profile pictures or branded hoodies. But it’s mostly because of the way that NFTs are embedded in software. Seriously—it may not sound glamorous, but this feature of NFTs is really about the software. Because NFTs are digital tokens that individuals can use across platforms, it’s possible to build all manner of spaces and activities around them.

When someone buys season tickets to their local ballet, they know that other people who attend regularly each month must have similar tastes, but they don’t have a way to reach those people—they’re more in the background. Web 2 community engagement mechanisms don’t do a great job of solving this problem. They’re siloed in individual platforms, which both makes it hard to figure out where a given community is based (a Facebook group? A specific subreddit?) and limits the form of activity once there. With NFTs, the other holders are front and center. The NFT serves multiple roles at once—it can be both the entry ticket to a ballet performance and a cross-platform community anchor. At minimum, at least for NFTs on public blockchains, you can look up other holders’ digital wallet addresses and see what else they’re into. And if you want to team up with some of the more engaged community members, for example, to co-sponsor some new Forsythe choreography, NFTs can help you track them down. (If you read that and were concerned about unsolicited contact or receiving unwanted NFTs, there are already solutions in place, which will continue to improve over time. Direct contact through an NFT-gated chat channel would require a person to opt in and connect, just like any other current chat medium. Meanwhile, if a person or company wants to send you an unsolicited NFT, there are hidden folders where they land, much like with email spam filters. So, chances are, if someone manages to contact you via NFT, it’s a person or entity you’d actually like to hear from.)

Driving Brand Evolution

Cells have semipermeable membranes that allow certain particles through and not others. Nutrients and water are absorbed, while contaminants are kept out. With NFT brands, there’s a semipermeable membrane between the company and the community. Everyone’s in effect part of the same organism, with bidirectional communication and shared goals. That means an NFT community can be a constant source of feedback and innovation. And when someone in the community has a great idea, it’s easy for the brand to absorb it—and reward the innovator. On the flip side, when holders are upset about something, the brand can learn that immediately through its community channels and quickly gather suggestions for how to respond.

Companies born in Web3 are being built collaboratively and in public for everyone to see.

NFT holders have a vested interest and an ongoing incentive to contribute to the brand and its community. With NFTs, we’re talking about a fundamentally new way to build companies that fully leverages customers’ relationship with the brand. If you’re starting a company, you can find product-market fit among a core community of enthusiasts, and they can then collaborate with you to build out the brand and its ecosystem. If you have an already established company, you can use NFTs to find entirely new markets along with your most engaged customers. And if you’re a consumer, you can participate in—and even demand—that type of engagement.

PART III: PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Finding the Proper Price and Scale

In practice, the vast majority of collectibles are sold at relatively accessible prices, at least within their product category—maybe a dollar for a souvenir keychain; $5 to $10 for a pack of trading cards; $20 for a special edition game-day program; or $250 for a fancy pair of sneakers. That doesn’t mean they aren’t produced in limited editions—but those editions might run in the many thousands or occasionally even millions. That’s the type of scale we expect to see for collectible NFTs in the long run: NFTs priced appropriately for their audience, and with supply large enough to make those prices sensible. Moreover, many of them will be acquired automatically with other purchases, or earned through effort or engagement, rather than being bought outright.

At the same time, part of what’s special about NFTs is that they emphatically don’t require global scale to get started—an NFT community can form around just a few people and spin outward from there. And just like how the subscription-based television has made it possible to produce niche shows that appeal to fewer people but generate a lot more value for those viewers, NFTs enable even small creators to build communities and cultivate fandom.

NFTs can be especially valuable when a creator is just getting started. They give a way for early fans to build their enthusiasm into their digital identity, and to find and interact with the creator and one another. And of course, NFTs also provide fans with some upside in the creator’s success because then the ownership value and utility can expand.

Designing Your NFT Strategy

In Scott’s course on marketplace design, he trains students to identify market failures—places where a market isn’t achieving its maximum social potential. Loosely, identifying market failures requires asking, Where is there an activity or transaction that people would like to engage in, but they aren’t? Whenever that happens, there is (almost tautologically) an opportunity for value creation if you can solve whatever the blocker is. Critically, it’s important to focus on the reason why people can’t engage or transact in the desired way. Defining an NFT opportunity is very much about identifying a market failure and its underlying cause (and of course, how NFTs can address the issue).

The NFT Staircase guides you to think about what NFT holders will own, what utility those assets will deliver, and how they will shape identity and community formation. At the same time, it’s important to ground the question of what NFT product to build in the context of a true market failure/opportunity for your company. You have to ask yourself: What is the brand purpose? And: Do NFTs solve a real problem here?

Understanding your design goal and the ways the different steps of the NFT Staircase factor in makes it possible to start thinking about how to define the NFT asset itself. You might consider, for example:

• Quantity: How many units should be available? For tickets, naturally, there should generally be one per seat. For digital collectibles where there is no physical constraint on supply, you might nevertheless want to impose limits as a way of creating scarcity or rarity. (That said, as we talked about in the previous chapter, you might not want your collectible to be too scarce!) For rewards and credentials, meanwhile, supply might instead be uncapped and tied to activities like product purchases or course completion.

• Transferability: Should users be able to exchange the asset among one another? Enabling trade is often a key part of the reason to adopt NFTs for use with tickets or collectibles. (Although there are exceptions—it would be a real pain if airlines made their tickets transferable, for example, because then speculators might buy up all the seats in advance, making it nigh impossible for ordinary consumers to plan travel.) Digital credentials, meanwhile, are typically nontransferable because they reflect a specific individual’s record of activity. And in the case of community co-creation, transferability might in essence be partial—one might be able to transfer their NFT to someone else, but still keep whatever rights or responsibilities they acquired while holding it.

• Metadata: What information will the NFT actually embed? An online education credential, for example, might encode information about the course, its instructor, and the date of completion—just like in a school transcript. A ticket would encode information about the show you’re seeing, seat number, and any benefits it might come with, such as an included food item.

• Acquisition process: How will people obtain the NFT? Maybe people collect rewards NFTs by scanning a QR code at the time of purchase. Tickets, meanwhile, might be distributed in a single primary sale or airdrop. At the same time, game assets or brand tokens might be continuously available—perhaps you can always get one at a fixed price by going to the company website, just like you might with a pack of trading cards.

From there, you’ll have a better idea of who your target consumers are and what they want, which should help make it clear which forms of utility they’ll value. Just as important, you know who your target consumer is not, which can provide a critical check on whether the utility you’re planning makes sense.

Once you understand your reasons for creating digital ownership and your target market for the desired utility, you’re ready to ascend the rest of the Staircase. For many NFT projects, you’ll want to think about precisely how holders will integrate the NFTs into their personal and public identities, and how community will coalesce (and what purpose it will serve). You may need to encourage this directly, perhaps by creating the space for it, such as a community message board or chat channel, and even rewarding it (“Anyone who uses one of our NFTs for their profile picture gets a free sweatshirt!”).

More broadly, unless you’re just using NFTs as infrastructure for the creation, sale, or trade of a specific digital asset, the process of launching an NFT product is different from other categories. You’re often in effect launching alongside your community, rather than just selling a product to customers. Brands need to clearly communicate the value proposition while recognizing that the product is likely to evolve over time. Moreover, as of 2023, the accessibility of the underlying technology was still an issue, so launching an NFT often came with a need to educate customers about what they were actually buying.

In many cases, there are benefits to leveraging multiple steps of the NFT Staircase even when you might naturally think just one or two of them are first-order. For example, although NFTickets seem to mostly be about ownership and a very simple form of utility (i.e., access to an event), there is a real opportunity to transform those tickets into part of a person’s digital identity, giving them a way of sharing their fandom. And meanwhile, although an NFT certifying completion of an online course might mostly be about identity, it’s also easy to imagine that it could anchor a form of alumni community, increasing user engagement with the platform, and possibly driving people to take more courses.

As we’ve already said, a huge part of the opportunity in many NFT applications is to enable others to innovate around the underlying asset. This might be as simple as inviting third parties to offer verified member benefits (like discounted drinks for anyone who’s holding an NFTicket to the day’s Celtics game). It also often comes from encouraging holders to expand upon the NFT or create derivatives—everything from writing the fictional backstory of your Bored Ape (or NFTopping) to creating community content independent of but encouraged by the NFT’s original issuer.

Ongoing Challenges

As with any novel asset class, NFTs raise questions about regulation. At a basic level, it can be hard to even determine what type of asset an NFT is—and indeed, the answer might vary with the format of the NFT and the specific functionalities it has. Many NFTs, such as those that simply confer ownership of digital artwork or collectibles, have a narrow range of characteristics that make them analogous to commodities or physical property. But some NFTs have a range of characteristics, including features that make them analogous both to commodities and to securities; active secondary markets for this latter category of NFTs raise significant regulatory and policy questions given the different ways commodities and securities markets are regulated.

How NFTs and Web3 Can Shape Us

NFTs are already creating novel industries, with new ways of building companies and brands. But the greatest and most transformative applications most likely haven’t even been imagined yet. What can you build on top of digital ownership? With a tall enough staircase, the sky is the limit.

NFTs are creating massive changes in how we interact with brands and each other, but by nature, they do so by enabling many, many micro-connections. NFTs stitch together dispersed networks, connecting people with shared interests all across the world. And when strangers with shared interests meet, all manner of wizardry can happen. Technology is funny like that sometimes. From a practical perspective, we often focus on the software infrastructure and the specific problems it can solve. But if used well, this particular technology can go far beyond software to give us better and more fulfilling lives as humans.