The term “digital ownership” has only recently come to mean anything. While nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have been around for some time now, it’s in the last year or two that they’ve caught the attention of mainstream media. The third quarter of 2021 alone saw over $10 billion in NFT trade volume across blockchains, a substantial increase from Q2’s $1.2 billion.

NFTs are unique digital assets that represent ownership. As proof of ownership, NFTs extend from things like art and digital collectibles to real estate and other physical assets. This is causing a tectonic shift in a wide range of industries, improving the efficiency of ownership transfer and breaking new ground in terms of what digital assets can offer.

According to Jonathan Choi, chief investment officer at Metaplex — the Solana protocol that set up open standards for on-chain digital asset issuance and ownership — that while NFTs are gaining traction among mainstream audiences for profile pictures, artwork, and collectibles, the technology behind NFTs is much more meaningful.

“NFTs can serve a much broader range of use cases, including representing ownership of physical assets such as real estate, loans, luxury items and other digital assets such as audio, files, degrees or certificates,” according to Coin Telegraph report.

Like most platforms in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, most NFT-based projects have been built on the Ethereum blockchain — and understandably so. Ethereum is the longest-running active smart contract-enabled  blockchain globally, and more than anything else, NFT sellers want an audience.