​'NFTs will spawn the next Marvel or Disney'

The co-founder of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, believes NFTs will spawn the next Marvel or Disney (big call!).

And he could well be right. Here's the key to that happening:

Tracking.

(Sounds weird, but hear us out).

Whether the problems are large or small - at a product level or industry level - tracking lets the world move faster and operate more efficiently:

• GPS made traveling waaaay smoother (no more pulling over to check street names against a paper map).
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• Parcel tracking updates massively reduced the amount of 'where's my order?' emails for e-commerce businesses (and as a result, reduced customer service expenses).
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• And web tracking (for better or worse) revolutionized the advertising industry, giving small businesses access to global reach, for cheap.

If the next Marvel or Disney is going to come from an NFT project, it'll be thanks to tracking.

NFT rarity and overall demand is tracked in realtime, which massively increases the feedback loop that drives fandom. Let's look at the 'then and now' of a successful adoption cycle, for collectibles.

Then​
A physical collectible is released → early adopters buy in → they tell their friends over the coming weeks/months → a few of them start collecting → they tell their friends → a community starts to build → which brings more people in → until it's widely collected.

(We saw this with Pokemon cards in the 90's. It felt fast, but it was actually a slow build over many years before Pokemon cards were 'everywhere').

Now​
An NFT collectible is released → early adopters buy in → demand and scarcity is reflected in real time on NFT marketplaces → it picks up buzz on a global level within days (thanks, Twitter) → FOMO sets in → everyone rushes to buy → it is widely collected within weeks.

It's the same result - just with a faster process. And it doesn't stop at adoption, the benefits extend to long term collecting as well.

E.g. If you were to find a Charizard Pokemon card in your closet, it could be worth a lot!

But to discover its true value, you'd first need to find out when it was printed, pay to get its condition assessed by a third party, then find a marketplace to show it to potential buyers (this is months of work).

The same process for a digital collectible would look like this: go to OpenSea and look at what others in the series are selling for.

Point is: NFT collectibles won't spawn the next Marvel or Disney because the ideas behind them are necessarily better - it will be because they can move faster.

Either way, it's exciting!