This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read the full editions, subscribe.
The total market capitalization of NFT currently stands at around $3.6 billion, a huge drop from the heady peaks of 2022.
Speculative NFT markets are dead, but the use cases of NFTs are not.
Non-fungible tokens as a data format and a unique digital identifier, in the technical sense, are still used in productive, non-speculative ways that don’t necessarily translate into a number graph.
Take podcasts, for example. Pods.media gives podcasters a way to easily tap into an alternative monetization stream by letting fans create NFTs of their podcast episodes. Users create their favorite podcast NFTs out of altruism, or simply because picking up a one-time free digital collectible is a no-brainer.
Since launching a year ago, Pods has onboarded more than 75 podcasts and collected more than $1 million in podcast episodes from 120,000 collectors.
One of Pods’ largest podcasts on its platform, Mint Podcast, has minted over 250,000 NFTs among 69,789 unique collectors. Mint Podcast has raised approximately $476,885 in revenue since it started using Pods in April 2024.
$477,000 isn’t life-changing money, but it’s a nice amount for a little-known podcast in an industry where the podcast supply is oversaturated.
But the real use of NFTs goes beyond a simple revenue stream.
After pushing his podcast audience toward a simple NFT coin with Pods, Adam Levy, the face behind Mint Podcast, was able to construct a comprehensive social graph of his anonymous audience.
To create a detailed onchain composition, Levy targeted his 90,000-strong audience using Bello. The marketing analytics product Web3, of which he co-founded, emerged from a hackathon at ETH Amsterdam.
“I discovered that a large percentage of my onchain audience were also Zora collectors. With that information, I was able to tap into the interests of my podcast listeners (with Bello) based on the history of their wallet onchain,” Levy tells Blockworks.
“I took action by creating more Zora-centric podcast episodes, which translated into another 40-50% increase in podcast content downloads.”
Essentially, NFTs allowed Levy to meet its users where they were when they took the first step to create an episode.
Unlike sending generic mass emails, Levy’s strategy enables tailored outreach to podcast audiences who were active Lens or Farcaster users directly in their social media DMs, or Coinbase Wallet users via the XMTP messaging protocol.
It also allows podcasters to manage their podcast content or sponsorships around popular content released in real time.
Imagine you have hard evidence that 80% of your dedicated podcast audience has interacted with a particular DeFi or NFT contract in the last six hours. Then imagine releasing a podcast episode or marketing message around that same topic within an hour.
It’s an abundance of onchain information that wouldn’t have been possible for a traditional podcaster using Spotify or Apple Music, Levy said.
“I no longer really care about my reach on Twitter or my audience on Instagram. I care more about the wallets that collect my content because I now have ways to engage them in a permissionless way where I can never be overshadowed. platform.”
In addition to podcasting, NFTs are also being used to combat counterfeiting and fraud in the luxury goods sector.
Since 2021, the Geneva-based nonprofit Aura consortium has been offering luxury brands a way to provide consumers with an easy way to track a product’s lifecycle and authenticate products on-chain with NFTs.
It’s a purely non-speculative use case that applies the immutable properties of NFTs to combat hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud and counterfeiting in a $300 billion dollar industry.
Aura has brought more than 50 million luxury goods onto the chain, from luxury watches, luggage, shoes, cars, jewelry and furniture to more than 50 luxury brands from Cartier, Dior, Prada, Mercedes-Benz and more.
Brands pay Aura licensing fees to use a private or public blockchain option, although 90% choose the former for data security and privacy reasons.
Traceability represents one of the major challenges in the luxury industry, partly due to laws such as the EU’s Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) and France’s Anti-Waste for a Circular Economy (AGEC), which place greater scrutiny on the life cycle of a product, Romain Carrere, CEO of Aura Blockchain Consortium, told Blockworks.
There are countless other cases where NFTs are being used for productive purposes, such as opening up new revenue streams for adult creators by MintStars, or raising funds and codifying intellectual property for niche science projects by Bio, as I’ve written before.
More about this in a future 0xResearch issue.