The co-founder and chairman of NFT game developer Animoca Brands, Yat Siu, thinks that nonfungible tokens provide a new way for culture to be stored securely in the virtual sphere.
Animoca Brands co-founder has urged the new NFT users to look past the profiteering phase and find new ways to use NFTs to redefine culture. In a recent interview, Siu insisted that while the technology that powers nonfungible tokens may be new, the desire to ‘store culture’ has for many years been existing throughout human history.
He stated:
“We describe NFTs as stores of culture, because they embody a moment in history. What is art? Art stores culture.”
Siu is a Hong Kong-based tech entrepreneur who has worked at Atari in the past and has also launched the Outblaze gaming firm. Animoca Brands was launched in 2014. Since then it has managed to release popular NFT projects including F1 Delta Time, The Sandbox, and MotoGP Ignition. It also invested in OpenSea, Dapper Labs, and Axie Infinity.
The Animoca chairman stated that the culture is nearly more than just the monetary value of art, and he pointed to the example of his beloved daughter and her favorite band BTS. He explained that she does not want to get an autograph from the popular L-Pop group in a bid to flip it for a speedy profit:
“Most paintings in the world aren’t worth a ton, but like owning culture, the vast majority of people who buy art today or photography don’t intend to sell it right away. That’s not how we engage with culture.”
When asked what advice he would give to the nonfungible token newcomers, Siu requested the newbies not to seek opportunities for quick money. Instead, they should focus on the revolutionary utilities enabled by the technology. he stated:
“Start with buying your first NFT, not to make money for you, but simply with a desire to […] learn from it.”
Siu also said that nonfungible tokens represent a dialectic shift in data ownership and data rights, insisting:
“What’s interesting about this ownership that we’re able to create, is that it doesn’t come from a sort of scarcity that you can dig up from the ground.”
Siu described data as something among the world’s “most valuable resources,” pointing to the relentless efforts of big tech firms like Facebook and Amazon to mining every bit of data from their users in a bid to personalize the advertising they see on social platforms. He added:
“Data has become the source of absolute power.”
Animoca Brands completed an $88.88 million capital raise in May according to the valuation of $1 billion. The nonfungible token market is growing explosively and many believe that it will be a major driving force for the crypto market in the coming years.
