NFT, the “Popular King” in the Cryptocurrency Circle — the “Brief History of Debut” of This “Popular Demon Star” and its Security Issues
From the skyrocketing price of crypto artwork NFT, to the digital cards of football players NFT and celebrity NFT, then to endless variety of meta-universe game character NFT, we will always see the keyword NFT from major media information platforms.
Currently NFT is still running wild, and fans are keen to buy their favorite celebrities’ NFTs. So what exactly is NFT? What are the effects of purchasing? How safe is it? Perhaps we can learn more about this “popular demon star”.
Today, we are going to look at the “brief history of debut” of this “popular star”, as well as some information of its value and safety. After all, now “chasing stars”, we still need to find a reliable one!
How did NFT become the “king of popularity” in the cryptocurrency world?
NFT, also known as Non-Fungible Token, is a type of digital cryptocurrency.
We are familiar with Bitcoin, which is a fungible token. In blockchain, “fungible” means that a bitcoin can be exchanged with another bitcoin. For example, if you have a $10 bill, I can change you for another $10 bill, and they’ll both have the same effect.
But NFTs are different. Although they are also recorded on a distributed account on the blockchain, each NFT is unique and irreplaceable.
In fact, the first NFT-like token, Bitcoin 2.X (also known as colored coins), was created back in 2012. Since then, NFTs have continued to evolve, dating back to the Rare Pepe Directory project launched by Counterparty.io in 2016 and the CryptoPunks pixel-painting project launched by John Watkinson and Matt Hall in 2017.
And the real boom in the NFT space began in late 2017 with the launch of CryptoKitties in early 2018 amidst the ethereum boom, causing a spike in interest in NFT activity.
When the market crashed in 2018, interest in NFT dwindled and even stalled, before it saw a resurgence in late 2020.
Until now, NFT has been the hottest item, resulting in statements like “everything is NFT” and “everyone can be a collector”.
NFT can be anything digital: a sound, an image, a piece of text, a game prop, and so on. While most of them are digital art, they are full of more possibilities, such as a 12-year-old boy who recently sold an NFT series inspired by stock photos of eight blue whales and earned over $160,000.
However, the real value of NFTs is those things that have been given “uniqueness”, and then produce “artistry” and “trade value”.
Why is everyone passionate about NFT collecting?
Traditional works of art, such as paintings, are valuable because they are unique. But digital files can be easily and endlessly reproduced.
With NFT, artworks can be “tokenized”, creating a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold. Like cryptocurrencies, NFTs are stored and recorded on a shared ledger on the blockchain.
Digital art is an early use case for NFT because blockchain technology ensures the unique signature and ownership of NFT. For NFT art, this means that ownership of the artwork — whether it’s a painting, a song, a video or something else — is uploaded to the blockchain, where it can be tracked, transferred, bought and sold.
As a result, artists and celebrities of all kinds are keen to issue NFTs of their own, and fans are also the payers of these NFTs.
However, how to avoid those worthless NFT artworks? Here are a few tips: you must buy items that already have a certain strong consensus and value, and stay away from NFT art projects that are over-hyped; in addition, you should buy NFT works that you like, and do not follow the trends to buy some NFTs that you dislike as well as worthless.
Is there a risk in NFT, the “popular demon star”?
Risks exist in every corner of the frontier.
Although NFT is currently of heat, its security incidents still occur from time to time.
For example, in March of this year, attackers hacked into multiple Nifty Gateway NFT user accounts. The attackers were able to transfer the previously purchased NFTs from the user accounts, as well as use the user’s archived payment cards to purchase new NFTs and then transfer them, causing losses to a large number of users.
Here, Beosin reminds all project parties to pay attention to the problems and vulnerabilities in the source code of smart contracts, and if necessary, they can be audited by professional security companies.
Now, we find that the NFT ecosystem seems to have encountered another common problem in the cryptocurrency industry — fraud.
It’s a platitude that where there is profit, there will be scammers. We have summarized a few methods about NFT scams that you need to be vigilant about.
1. Fake NFT store (phishing site)
Scammers copy the popular NFT retail sites, which look exactly the same as the original ones. Such sites will obtain the user’s account and bank card information to form a scam. Of course, there are also some so-called NFT stores, which are just empty shells, where they sell non-existent products in the store to users.
2、Impersonate the artists to sell NFTs
Some project parties are not authorized by artists or celebrities, such as famous paintings or songs, so the scammers will impersonate the artist and forge fake NFT. Users need to be cautious in buying or bidding, as NFTs with no authorization are, in fact, of no collection value, and are not recognized as well.
3. Social media scams.
Fraudsters commit fraudulent acts in crypto communities or social media like Twitter, Telegram, WeChat groups, QQ groups, etc. For example, they will pretend to be customer service, or gain trust by answering your questions, and then finally deceive you.
4、Giveaway/airdrop
Fake NFT is a counterfeit. Limited amount is fake, but increasing the amount is real. Since the content carrier of NFT is public, forgery is basically costless, resulting in constant counterfeiters.
Afterword
As the currently hot “fan harvesting machine”, NFT has attracted more and more attention from the public. Indeed, the birth of new things is often controversial, such as the debate whether the skyrocketing price of NFT is a hype or a bubble. But what can know is that the current popular NFT is creating more and more records.
