Challenges faced in using NFTs: education and security
Two main challenges face the business adoption of NFTs is they are going to deliver, namely education within the business and with customers, and safety and security issues around use of NFTs. One of the best things Gary Vaynerchuk did before launching his NFT was to spend a month or so on Twitter educating his audience about NFTs first. If you’re planning on leading your business into the NFT space, start by educating your audience on what an NFT is and how you’re integrating it into your services and community. Because NFTs are still very new, many people are still somewhat skeptical about what an NFT is, what it does, and what they can do with it. They don’t yet know what a wallet is, how to set up a wallet, or how to keep their funds secure once everything is set up. As the business owner and community leader in your NFT space, you’ll want to take time to show your audience where to go to create their wallet, how to create their wallet, and explain to them what NFTs are before you even launch your NFT. This will help your audience accept and move into the NFT space with you. If you don’t do this extra step to prepare your existing audience for the advent of NFTs inside your business, then you risk losing them right as your NFT launches. Instead, you want them primed and ready to buy into your NFT and help build your community by buying into it. And that requires that your audience understand the value of NFTs in general but also the value of your specific NFT and what they’re going to get out of it.
At the recent BigONE expert discussion on NFTs a key issue came up that’s very relevant for businesses to ensure their adoption of this new technology is successful, namely safety. It’s really kind of sad and ironic that the entire point of a blockchain is this concept called Byzantine fault tolerance, meaning all the different people you’re connecting with, how do you trust that the messages you’re sending and receiving are legitimately part of consensus, meaning everyone there who’s participating agrees that this digital item that you use to control is now transferred from you to someone else, and now they control it. It’s very easy to do with a physical item, I just hand it to you and ever knows, oh, now it’s in your possession, it’s yours. But a picture of an item is very challenging. How do you know I didn’t send it to 20 other people before I sent it to you? While the concept of NFTs enabled people to say provably with cryptographic security, you are the correct owner. The challenge is it can be very confusing.
One option to make life easier for businesses and customers is to use a solution by the FIO (Foundation for Interwallet Operability) which provides human readable addresses to your crypto interactions. So instead of a big, long, Ethereum address, or a long, Tezos address, businesses can have their own address, whether for a record label, or whatever the situation might be. And that’s a human readable experience for sending and receiving these digital assets. What’s good about the FIO’s solution to making NFTs more user friendly and more secure is that you can also sign into your NFTs with human readable addresses. So, when an artist makes a painting for example, he or she’s gonna he signs it like any piece of art, right? They sign it and to say, this is mine, I did this. If somebody then tries to take a copy of this jpeg, or a copy of this song file and pretend that they’re me, and then go minted on some other blockchain on some other.
Anndy Lian: "The issue is how do you know that it’s the real NFT, as most people don’t actually check the contract address. Rather than invite government regulation it’s important for the crypto industry to self-regulate, and as much as possible to do so with self-sovereign tools like the FIO protocol, that are open source, openly, freely accessible, permissionless systems that actually reward all the participants. So, it’s worth businesses considering some solution to sign your NFTs with human readable addresses, so the artists get rewarded, the platform developers get rewarded, the participants get rewarded, via the value created by the blockchain itself."
