Although blockchain and cryptocurrencies have been around for years, NFT is a relatively new phenomenon.

Tokens of this kind were created back in the mid-2010s, but the first NFT projects became available only in 2017. The popularization of NFT, which people are now earning millions of dollars with, was originally credited to CryptoKitties, a game in which you can breed virtual cats. The game became extremely popular, and the sums for which you can sell digital pets exceeded $100,000.

Professor Donna Redel – formerly the managing director of the World Economic Forum and now an expert on blockchain and cryptocurrency at Fordham University – shared her views on the development of NFT.

She notes: “the ‘resurgence’ of NFT in 2021 is closely tied to advances in the blockchain infrastructure itself. “We’ve been watching the continued development of blockchain,” says Redel. – People have been taking the bitcoin system as the basis, and that’s how the Lightning protocol (a payment protocol that allows instant transactions – GA note) came about. […] We also watched the development of technologies based on the Ethereum blockchain platform. People were building [the infrastructure of non-interchangeable tokens] rather than making purchases.”

Donna Redel is the first woman to lead a U.S. exchange
Redel notes that the development of blockchain technology and the emergence of NFT services (many of which appeared in the past year) also coincided with other processes in society and the economy. A large number of new players, including non-professional traders and amateur investors, have emerged in stock markets (and cryptocurrency markets).

The democratization of the stock market (the apotheosis of which was the situation around Gamestop shares) coincided with a pandemic: being in self-isolation, alone with their devices, many people began to pay attention to new financial instruments.

A certain role in the “revival” of NFTs was also played by the information buzz around them. The big names in the news headlines in the neighborhood of NFTs couldn’t help but draw attention to them. It is one thing when NFT is talked about in narrow gamer communities, and another thing when celebrities such as Elon Musk, Banksy, or Paris Hilton release their tokens.