🤖Introduction

Why is Rollbit getting involved in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market?

We see an opportunity to enter this fast-growing market, which you’ll learn more about in this whitepaper. The latest wave of NFT adoption has seen the number of Ethereum wallets interacting with NFT smart contracts rise to new highs during ‘JPEG Summer’, growing more than +1,000% in the past 12 months.

As value is increasingly captured from not just art, but also areas such as collectibles, music and utility, the number of wallets interacting with NFT smart contracts will continue to grow. Also on the horizon are scaling improvements for Ethereum, which will drive further growth by improving the user friendliness and reducing the costs of buying and trading NFTs (in the meantime we have plans to address this, more details in our Roadmap).

Over the past year, the sharp rise in the number of unique buyers illustrates the explosion of interest in NFTs. The growth in the number of new buyers entering the market is extraordinary, almost 10x since the start of 2021, while also outpacing the number of sellers. As of October 2021, there are over 130,000 unique buyers just on the Ethereum chain alone, illustrating strong demand for NFTs and there’s still plenty of room for growth!

Many of the big cryptocurrency funds and investors have recently shown that NFTs are an attractive asset to hold after going on buying sprees for the very best pieces from high-profile collections. These pieces are seen as a store of value play and as owning a part of the history from the digital renaissance that’s been taking place since the invention of Bitcoin.

As a result, the total spent on NFT sales has increased exponentially, with 2021 set to be remembered as a breakout year for the NFT market, with the trailing 30-day volume rising from less than $100 million to a peak of $2.75 billion! A rising tide lifts all boats. So we are inclined to believe that the NFT trend will stick and that volumes will head a lot higher over the next 3-5 years.

The charts provided here are just scratching the surface, since NonFungible.com only tracks NFT activity on Ethereum’s blockchain. There are other Layer 1 blockchains such as Cardano, Flow, Solana, Tezos and WAX, all of which have vibrant NFT communities, as well as those that are utilising Ethereum’s Layer 2 solutions or standards other than ERC-721 (e.g., ERC-1155).

With traditional players in the scene, such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s, increasingly getting involved in the sale of NFTs, art has become the use case that puts NFTs in the spotlight. In our view, we are still in the early stages of adoption. A more interesting development with greater potential is the idea of utility NFTs.

The Spectrum of Non-Fungible Tokens: From Art to Utility

One example is the Ethereum Name Service, which allows you to link your Ethereum address to a ‘.eth’ domain and receive payments with a simple, personalised human-readable name. During Q2 2021, utility NFTs made up just 1% of the total NFT market’s volume, but we believe they are going to be the next subsector to pop as more use cases are explored by more established businesses as well as crypto-native firms and startups.

Since there are more NFT buyers than ever, we thought why not create one that complements our existing business, has a well-defined purpose and provides real utility for its holders. What if NFTs can be something more than a work of art or a collectible? That’s exactly the road we’re going down and we’re excited to make our story known. We are creating our own bit of history in the era of the digital renaissance by becoming the first crypto casino to launch a utility-focused NFT project.