[Current & Culture] Where Have All the NFTs Gone?

It is truly a word difficult to explain in pure Korean. NFT. Non-fungible token. In Korean, it is roughly known as ‘daetae bul ganeunghan blockchain token’ (non-substitutable blockchain token), but a detailed explanation of the concept would require this entire space, and since I am not an expert, I will omit it.

Back at the beginning of last year, NFT-related news poured out almost daily. The reason this new technology, whose concept itself was difficult to grasp, attracted attention was, of course, money. The NFT market, which did not even exist a few years ago, became a new investment destination, attracting astronomical capital. Especially in the cultural and artistic fields, the synergy effect was great, and tokens representing ownership of game characters, photos, or even a single painting were sold for billions. But now? The cryptocurrency market is struggling, so the NFT market cannot be doing well either. Capital and interest have drained away like a receding tide, and prices have plummeted.

In the same context, there is a need to reevaluate the previous government’s real estate missteps from a different angle. This may sound like criticism or perhaps defense. Earlier, I mentioned that the NFT market’s fever has cooled down, and the real estate market is also unable to escape a downward trend. Of course, so-called record-high prices occasionally appear, but that is only in some areas due to the preference for a single well-located property. Has the current government, which has been in office for just over a month, successfully stabilized prices through good real estate policies? Absolutely not. It is simply that the era of asset price surges has ended.

The previous government’s mistake was not failing to stabilize real estate prices but misleading the public into believing that they could confidently control the real estate market. Far from being controlled, prices continued to soar, and the government, caught off guard, issued desk-bound policies that only further confused the market. To put it bluntly, in a situation where global asset markets are surging, no government in South Korea can stabilize the real estate market. It may have been a desperate hope or expectation, but it is beyond the capability of any single government. The current inflation phenomenon is the same. Regardless of the global inflation tsunami, our government should not boast that it is confident in controlling prices and reassure the public.

So, has the NFT market completely disappeared? Not at all. Just as numerous cryptocurrencies continue to be traded despite price crashes, a market for buying and selling NFT assets still exists. Perhaps, in this winter of investment, beneath the frozen ground, real seeds are gathering vitality. This is what you might call separating the wheat from the chaff. Recently, Shinsegae Department Store created and sold 10,000 NFTs of its representative character, which sold out in one second. Earlier this month, the Kansong Art Museum divided the national treasure-level cultural asset, painter Shin Yun-bok’s work ‘Dano Festival Scene,’ into 355 NFTs and sold them. Other museums are also planning exhibitions and sales incorporating NFT technology one after another. Although there are criticisms that this is just greed for profit, many believe that NFT is a technology that most justly guarantees and distributes the commercial value of culture and art.

Whether stocks, real estate, cryptocurrencies, or NFT markets, unless it is a communist country, no government can fully control them. It is a matter to approach with humility and caution. Before that, study hard. You need to know what is what to make proper policies. I suddenly wonder: will there come a day when even articles like this are traded as NFTs? I wonder how much this column would be worth.

Lee Jae-ik, Novelist