Hey there,
It’s Robin from CFD Engine & I’m straying out of my lane & into the world of cryptocurrency & blockchain technologies this week.
Bear with me while I take a quick look at the latest hype tech, the NFT, to see if it might be useful in CFD land.
If you’ve never heard of an NFT I’ll do my best to give you an idea of what they are, why you might be interested & a few things we could do with them.
You might have seen dudes like this floating around the web & making news by selling for big bucks (that image recently sold for ~$260,000 & that’s not even an expensive one).
Well that’s one of the things you can do with an NFT, but I’m not suggesting we all rush off & sell our post-pro at auction – there’s much more to NFTs than just that.
I’m not a crypto expert, or a blockchain buff, and these are just part-baked thoughts, but sharing them might help clarify things for both of us 🤞
Let’s go…
What’s an NFT?
NFT stands for non-fungible token – it’s a digital certificate of ownership that is verified, publicly-available, unique & (usually) linked to a digital asset.
As well as being a certificate of ownership, the NFT also includes a set of coded instructions that describes how it should be transacted (who pays what, to whom, when & what they get in return) often referred to as a smart contract.
They’re smart in the sense that they don’t need a middleman to orchestrate the sale, so the token can easily be traded between parties.
The headline grabbing NFTs have mostly been associated with digital art, but they don’t need to be.
What else could we do with NFTs?
NFTs in CFD land
Software Licensing
How about NFT-based software licensing?
What if you could transfer, resell or rent out your unused software licences?
What if you had granular, independent licences that covered smaller feature sets?
Need combustion modelling for this project? Buy an NFT that grants instant access to it for the next 3 months, all transacted via a self-serve portal – no sales people, license keys or purchase orders to deal with.
What if you could verify your license ownership via the blockchain? No more being tied to a particular set of machines, or checking in/out via a vendor’s license server.
Whilst I can’t see the big code vendors adopting it, a challenger might try it, there are clear benefits for the users & that might be a useful point of difference in the market.
OpenFOAM Supporters Club
OpenCFD (or The Foundation) could create an “OpenFOAM Supporters Club” which you could join by purchasing one of a limited number of NFTs.
Aside buying it just to show your support, membership might come with a handful of perks, such as:
- a social profile artwork to signify your status as a supporter
- access to an annual digital conference, just for club members
- access to a online community, just for club members
The creators would get the funds from the purchases, plus royalties on re-sale.
Exclusive Access
Code vendors could offer exclusive access to events, training, support & releases via NFT purchases, such as:
- access to their next 5 annual conferences
- 2 priority bug fixes per year
- exclusive digital training sessions:
- a pre-release walk-through with Q&A
- a post-release update/upgrade session
Or they could go crazy & move to an annual release schedule with additional releases only for super-golden-NFT holders 🧐
What do you reckon?
New technologies always present opportunities, so it’s interesting to do these little thought experiments.
I think there’s an element of a solution looking for a problem here, but I can definitely see some of these things coming to pass, just maybe not anytime soon.
Cryptocurrencies probably need to become more mainstream & easier to use first. Not everyone is comfortable paying for something with an unfamiliar currency, especially not businesses.
Plus, there are environmental concerns over energy usage and tax & accounting treatments that need to be sorted out too.
What do you reckon? Do any of the use cases sound interesting to you? What would you do with an NFT in CFD land? Or is it really a Non Functioning Technology?
Drop me a note, I’m keen to hear from you.
Until next week, stay safe,
