NFT
Non-Fungible Token. A unique blockchain-tracked asset where each token is distinguishable from every other. Where regular tokens are interchangeable, NFTs represent unique items like art, collectibles, in-game assets, or domain names.
Also known as: non-fungible token
NFTs solve a specific problem: how to represent unique digital items on a blockchain that’s natively designed for fungible tokens. The breakthrough was ERC-721, the Ethereum standard that lets a single contract issue many tokens, each with its own unique ID and metadata. CryptoPunks (2017) and CryptoKitties (2017) were the early proof-of-concept projects. The 2021 NFT boom (Bored Apes, Art Blocks, generative collections) brought NFTs to mainstream attention and most of the speculative attention has since faded.
The 2021 hype distorted what NFTs are actually useful for. The hype framing was “NFTs are digital art with proven scarcity, and scarcity equals value.” The reality is that scarcity by itself doesn’t create value, and most of the speculative collections from 2021 trade at fractions of their peak. What survived the bust is the underlying technology being used for use cases where uniqueness genuinely matters: in-game items with real ownership, blockchain-based domain names (ENS), tokenised real-world assets, music royalty rights, and event ticketing.
In DeAI, NFTs occasionally appear as a structural device but rarely as the main product. Some projects use NFTs to represent compute resources, GPU access rights, or model fine-tunes. Ocean Protocol uses NFTs to represent ownership of data assets that can be made available to AI training without revealing the underlying data. Sahara uses NFT-like primitives for AI model lineage tracking. None of these are central to the DeAI thesis but they’re mechanically useful for representing things that genuinely shouldn’t be fungible.
The honest framing is that NFTs as a category have a credibility problem from the 2021 hype cycle, and any project that leans heavily on NFT terminology in 2026 is either solving a real uniqueness problem or recycling the marketing playbook. The OYM project reviews try to distinguish the two. NFTs that represent real ownership of computationally meaningful assets are interesting; NFTs that represent JPEGs of monkeys are mostly historical.