NFTs & Web3

NFTs went from a cultural phenomenon to a much quieter market, and honest coverage has to account for both. This section deals with digital ownership and the infrastructure beneath it, including the substantial gap between what was promised at the peak and what is actually used now.

What an NFT records is a pointer and a ledger entry saying which address controls it. That is genuinely useful for some things — provable provenance, transferable access, on-chain credentials — and it is not the same as owning the underlying work, nor does it guarantee the file will still be hosted in five years. Where a project's marketing implies more than the token does, we say so.

Coverage includes marketplace activity and where royalties actually ended up, the storage question of whether assets are on-chain or on a server somebody has to keep paying for, identity and credential experiments, and the gaming projects that repeatedly promised economies and mostly delivered token launches.

Liquidity is the specific trap here. A collection's floor price is a quoted number, not a bid you can hit, and NFT markets can go from active to effectively unsellable in weeks. Read liquidity before treating a valuation as real.

For the networks these things run on, see Ethereum and Solana, and gas for why minting costs what it does. Nothing in this section is financial advice.

Royalties are worth understanding before treating creator earnings as reliable. On-chain royalties were largely a marketplace convention rather than something the token enforced, and when marketplaces competed on fees many simply stopped honouring them. Creators who had planned around that income discovered it was optional. It is a useful case study in the difference between what a protocol guarantees and what an intermediary chooses to do.