Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, in a recent podcastrevealed that he did not expect non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to be as successful as they are right now.
I didn’t expect NFTs to be so successful
Buterin, often the face of Ethereum and one of the six co-founders of the smart contracting platform, continues to be impressed by how the NFT industry has been gaining traction in recent years.
In his assessment, the co-founder said that among the many ideas he had projected to take root, Ethereum excluded the concept of creating non-fungible assets that can be transferred on-chain, representing value.
He said:
“NFTs are probably the only thing I didn’t predict, by the way. If you look at the list of apps that were in the Ethereum Whitepaper, and you look at the apps that are popular today, the biggest thing that’s on the second list and not the first is NFTs.”
Instead, Vitalik had envisioned smart contracts shaping finance, resulting in the current spark in decentralized finance and other strengths.
Right now, decentralized finance protocols, including Lido Finance, MakerDAO, and Uniswap, are among the top dApps with billions in total value locked (TVL).
Uniswap, for example, has mastered decentralized token trading and recently introduced NFT support. During the interview, Vitalik said that the launch of Uniswap at the end of 2018 marked the beginning of the DeFi era. In early 2020, DeFi TVL surpassed $1 billion for the first time.
Other notable applications in DeFi include MakerDAO, which was reported to be one of the most active DAOs, along with Optimism DAO. The protocol has affected the way users can lend and borrow digital assets without including the services of a third party.
As an industry, DeFi protocols control over $48 billion of different assets in protocols launched on various blockchains, including on Ethereum, BNB Chain, Cardano, Polygon, and others.
NFTs are fundamental to cryptocurrencies
Amid the expansion of DeFi, gaming, the metaverse, and other applications on Ethereum and smart contracting platforms, is the rise of NFTs. NFTs allow users to create unique assets that, like fungible tokens, can be transferred on public chains. On Ethereum, NFTs are mostly compliant with the ERC-721 standard. However, depending on what its creators want, it can be designed to adopt other NFT standards, including ERC 1155.
NFTs have found application in various spheres, including DeFi. For example, Uniswap v3 uses NFTs for liquidity, while gaming and metaverse platforms integrate NFTs to reward players.
