Glam or scam? Owning an NFT is purely a status symbol

In 1975, an American called Gary Dahl was sitting in a bar listening to his friends complain about their pets. He joked that he had the perfect pet: a rock that doesn’t require any special care and will never die. He then sold rocks to people as pets and made 6 million dollars.

Fast forward to 46 years later, 31-year-old crypto mogul Justin Sun spent half a million to buy an EtherRock NFT. And he can’t even take it home and pet it. Because it’s just an image of a rock and there are 99 more of them, the only difference is the color of each rock.

What makes NFTs so expensive?

Recently, Stephen Curry spent $180,000 on a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT which is a randomly generated ape that has blue fur, zombie eyes and is wearing a tweed suit. The last two attributes are very rare with only 3% of apes having zombie eyes and 1% of apes wearing tweed suits. Curry updated his Twitter profile picture with his ape image.

According to the BAYC website, the NFT is also a “membership card” to the Yacht Club, and there are some perks that come along with it.

To most people, it’s hard to understand how JPG files are sold for millions. Because those files can be found, copied or downloaded from the internet anytime people want. However, in the crypto world, we are not talking about JPG files here, we are talking about NFT which stands for Non-Fungible Token. The difference between them is that NFTs make digital assets scarce and scarcity makes digital assets valuable, like a luxury car or an expensive handbag. People are not only paying for the utility but also the social capital in it.

The best way to explain it: people are status-seeking animals and they always try to find the most efficient way to maximize their social capital.

NFTs will clearly play a role in the Metaverse

In June this year, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook would strive to build a world known as the metaverse. Now, everyone is living in a social network but soon, everyone will live in a digital world where owning an NFT will be the price of admission, like a @harvard.edu address was for Facebook.

In the metaverse, owners of the NFTs don’t have to worry about the permanence and immutability which are part of the core value proposition of an NFT. However, many NFTs being generated nowadays can’t provide neither of these properties due to the cost and space limitations of storing data on a blockchain, only the ownership record is actually stored, with metadata linking to the actual content of the NFT.

Imagine that people will be owning NFTs and different kinds of digital assets which need to be stored and retrieved easily. In the meantime, the content associated with the NFT can’t be changed or go offline at any point of time, leaving the original asset lost forever.

Luckily, Stratos Decentralized Storage can help to address these concerns, and there are several advantages provided by Stratos compared to other storage solutions:

💎 Users can easily view, store, and retrieve their content in a fully decentralized network.

💎 Faster upload and download speed compared to other storage solutions to provide seamless and efficient experience.

💎 Simply upload the asset to Stratos wallet app and manage the asset in a reliable, fast and secure way.

💎 Lower the cost by removing the middleman while remaining safe from cyber attacks.

When people are paying millions of dollars for seeking social status, keeping their social capital safe will become the next big thing. Stratos is here to make sure everyone can rest assured that their new digital assets are truly permanent and immutable in the metaverse.

About Stratos:

Stratos is the next generation of decentralized Data Mesh that provides scalable, reliable, self-balanced storage, database, and computation network. Stratos is born for scaling blockchain process capacity while retaining the decentralized benefits of a distributed protocol including trustless, traceability, verifiability, privacy and etc.

Stratos is best positioned to support data storage and adoption for developers and users in this ever-expanding digital economy. Stratos strives to make decentralized data adoption easier for the blockchain industry and Web 3.0.

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