NFTs; what they are, why they’re important, and the reasons Rangers are launching a collection of them.
NFT stands for non-fungible token, and to understand what these are it’s first necessary to understand what fungible means and what fungible tokens are.
In essence, a fungible asset is anything which can be readily interchanged - like normal money.
With money, you can swap a £10 note for two £5 notes and it will have the same value. Similarly, if you have two £10 notes, they’re indistinguishable from one another in terms of value; it doesn’t matter if you have one of the notes or the other - they’re both worth the same.
In cryptocurrency, bitcoin is an example of a fungible token; if you’ve got two bitcoins in a wallet, you can’t tell them apart. If you transfer one to another wallet with 10 bitcoins in it, it will go into the general pool and you won’t be able to tell it apart from any of the other tokens.
However, if something is non-fungible, this is impossible - it means it has unique properties so it can't be interchanged with something else.
It could be a house, or a painting such as the Mona Lisa, which is one of a kind. You can take a photo of the painting or buy a print but there will only ever be one original painting.
NFTs are "one-of-a-kind" assets in the digital world that can be bought and sold like any other piece of property, but which have no tangible form of their own.
The digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets.
To use an analogy, think of fungible tokens like bitcoin as drops of water, and NFTs as pebbles; when you put a drop of water into a glass, it becomes indistinguishable from the other water in the glass. However, if you put a pebble into a glass of other pebbles, you’ll be able to see the specific pebble which you’ve just put into the glass.
How do NFTs work?
Traditional works of art such as paintings are valuable precisely because they are one of a kind.
But digital files can be easily and endlessly duplicated.
With NFTs, artwork can be "tokenised" to create a digital certificate of ownership that can be bought and sold.
As with crypto-currency, a record of who owns what is stored on a shared ledger known as the blockchain.
The records cannot be forged because the ledger is maintained by thousands of computers around the world.
NFTs can also contain smart contracts that may give the artist, for example, a cut of any future sale of the token.
Why Rangers is launching an NFT collection?
NFTs solve a big problem with digital art and collectibles: how to own an original. For creators who freely upload their work or sell it as identical copies, the concept of an original is difficult to pin down.
Exclusivity is impossible to enforce when digital files can be shared freely on the internet. But collectors want the cachet that comes with having an exclusive claim on an artwork. This is where NFTs fit in, and this is why we’re creating an NFT collection to commemorate our undefeated season.
We’ve crafted 1,111 unique items of digital memorabilia, so that our fans can own a piece of Rangers club history. By turning these into NFTs, our fans will be able to own this iconic collection safe in the knowledge that the artwork they buy is truly one of a kind, and that they’re the only person in the world to own the specific artwork which they buy.
For more information around our upcoming NFT collection, please see HERE.
A beginner's guide to the NFT marketplace and how to use OpenSea can be found HERE.