“Featured by Binance:” an NFT gallery directly owned by a cryptocurrency exchange

https://featured.market/blog/introducing-featured-by-binance.html

Teck 
CEO of Featured by Binance
10 June 2021

Introducing Featured by Binance

We are excited to announce the imminent launch of a new platform that we’ve been incubating called Featured by Binance. Our vision is to provide a non-custodial, on-chain platform to facilitate the full lifecycle of NFTs for creators, brands and their fans.

We want to apply our deep experience in launching tokens and creating markets to the NFT space. At launch, the platform will focus on helping our brand partners launch NFT assets with strong unique narratives, a marketplace to trade those assets, and creator tools to mint, sell and showcase their NFT creations.

We’d like to use the rest of this post to share our perspectives on where this burgeoning NFT space is going. We hope that this also helps you get a sense of how our platform will evolve in the future.

NFTs: Hype and Hypothesis

If you haven’t been living under a rock lately, you would know that NFTs have captured the imagination of the mainstream public, and the word ‘NFT’ has entered the vernacular of popular culture.

It’s interesting to observe that the hype was driven in equal parts by creators/fans embracing this newfangled technology, and on the flip side, mainstream media who is desperately trying to understand why anyone would spend meaningful money on easily replicable digital assets.

In any case, the NFT hype peaked in early May 2021 and has since settled back down to less frothy levels. Even then, NFT transaction volumes are an order of magnitude higher than before, when hardly anybody knew what NFTs were. I’ll take 10x growth in three months any day.

This begs the question: Are NFTs a flash in the pan or here to stay?

It’s not hard to guess where we stand on this. We think NFTs are part of a bigger behavioral shift and our platform would like to be a factor in how this plays out.

The New Digital Normal

As we all experienced in the past year, the pandemic has accelerated the shift to digital in many aspects of our lives. The way we work, play, conduct commerce, socialize, experience culture and entertain ourselves have all been transformed, some in more jarring ways than others.

In 2020, billings and sales of digital goods and services facilitated by the App Store ecosystem increased by more than 40%.

A Global Perspective on the Apple App Store Ecosystem

Now, brands have to find new ways to meaningfully engage their users in the digital realm. Some verticals that are more digitally-native, like games and streaming entertainment, are more well-positioned than the others, like sports, consumer goods, fine arts and live entertainment, that have traditionally operated in the physical realm.

Regardless, a consistent and well-proven element underlying all digital experiences is the use of digital goods. Digital goods have been used successfully in multitude of ways to engage fans and monetize IP. GenZs, who grew up in the era of app stores, are primary drivers of this trend as there is an increasing number of them coming into credit-worthy age.

We believe that the next evolution of digital goods will be on the blockchain and NFTs are the first step towards that transformation.

Digital Goods on the Blockchain

What we are seeing are early market dynamics pushing digital goods towards a better platform. Just as ‘money’ and financial markets (DeFi) have, slowly but surely, migrated to the blockchain, digital goods will do the same…. (etc, etc)