Over the last year, venture capitalists poured more than $4.6 billion into infrastructure and projects related to nonfungible tokens (NFTs). This infrastructure now needs users. They will come when people understand that they can apply these NFTs not just for speculative purposes but to design and structure their everyday activities. For these, they don’t need NFTs — they need to sort their lives out. And, decentralized catalogs are there to help them do it.
We can think about an NFT as a book someone owns, and this ownership is recorded on the blockchain. But what we’re actually missing is the library.
Not just a flower, but a garden
Multiple NFTs making up a collection form a system. This system has a structure through the standards it uses. If you’ve ever visited CryptoKitties, you’ve probably noticed the museum-like categorization of the Kitties and their attributes in their “catalog.”
However, each item in the collection means nothing without the collection itself. You can’t take a CryptoKitty out of the original smart contract. You can copy the image or create a fractional version of it, but you will not be able to transfer its value if the derivative version of your CryptoKitty isn’t linked to the original collection. This means that the value of each NFT is not determined by a stand-alone item…
