Ethereum has been in the news for quite some time now for driving the entire non-fungible tokens marketplace, but the growth potential is not yet capped according to Tether’s stable coin co-founder William Quigley.
NFT annual sales had reached around $2.5 billion as of July this year, with nearly half of that value transacted in July alone. Quigley now says that NFTs could grow to hit annual sales of $10 trillion in the metaverse.
“From a consumer-product standpoint, what’s interesting to me is not one NFT selling for $1 million, but a million NFTs being sold at $1 each. A brand-new business for digital collectibles. That seems to me to have longer legs and overall a bigger market.”
According to the co-founder, the market currently seems to be populated by deals from crypto-rich individuals and renowned artists, but traditional art buyers are yet to dip their toes into it. And when they do, we are going to see accelerated market growth in terms of annual sales.
Metaverse, which refers to interconnected digital virtual worlds and borrowed from the Second Life and OpenSim technology communities, is now a popular topic among those who have recently come to know NFTs as valuable virtual items for instance as traded in OpenSea and other NFTs marketplaces.
Metaverse is a less-known word in the crypto and digital world but Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has talked about it a few times now, probably alluding that Facebook is headed in that direction. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin too, signaling its huge potential in the future. It’s certainly an area in which many companies and individuals are spending a lot of money.
Quigley said in the interview with Bloomberg that the metaverse has been welcoming artificial reality, a technology that enables people to overlay digital worlds over real items. This will impact the metaverse and NFT marketplaces in a big way. This is because NFTs will likely be the revenue model for the new metaverse.
“In video gaming, the revenue model now is virtual items, and that’s a $175 billion business annually. I think the metaverse should be orders of magnitude more than that because it’s everything, it’s not just gaming.”
