Key highlights:
- Messari, a cryptocurrency analytics company, published a new report focusing on the NFT market
- According to the report, Nifty Gateway one of the biggest winners in the NFT market, with a valuation between $774 million and $1.2 billion
The NFT market has attracted a lot of attention recently. While NFTs have been around for several years, they became a major trend in the cryptocurrency space only a few months ago. This new interest for the innovative NFT technology has created many winners, with the Gemini-backed Nifty Gateway arguably being the biggest. The platform, which was bought by Gemini in November of 2019, is the biggest player in the NFT market and could be valued as high as $1.2 million, according to an estimate from Messari.
The NFT industry is in the spotlight currently, and the report is the result of this huge wave of interest. A record-breaking $69.3 million auction for an NFT created by renowned digital artist Beeeple has brought unprecedented attention to this technology.
What are NFTs?
NFT is short for non-fungible tokens. These tokens exist on a blockchain and are useful for representing ownership of digital products like digital art, video game items and collectibles. In theory, NFTs can also be used to represent ownership of physical assets. One popular platform that uses NFTs is NBA Top Shot, where users can collect videos showing impressive highlights from NBA players.
Sales volumes for NFT platforms have skyrocketed recently, and Messari estimates that Nifty Gateway is the biggest player in the space. OpenSea is another big player, and its valuation is estimated between $321 and $498 million.
An aggressive estimation for the NFT market
The estimations mentioned above for the platforms were focused on a conservative model for forecasting NFT income in 2021. Using a more speculative model, the valuation for Nifty Gateway could be between $5.5 to $8.6 billion.
Digital art is one of the most popular use cases for NFTs right now. However, the potential of NFTs is much broader. Documents, music, and many different digital products can also represented via NFT. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is experimenting with NFTs as well, and is selling an NFT that represents the first tweet ever published on the Twitter platform.
