We increasingly live in digital worlds. The metaverse requires an open standard for ownership of its digital items. NFTs are that standard: digitally-native property rights for a digital world.

If NFTs are to represent every digital item in the metaverse, NFT infrastructure must be built on some basic principles:

First, it’s critical that creators can own their works. This already rings true to creators today. Before long, it will become a burning necessity, as creators bundle their works into their own tokens representing themselves, their brands, and their communities.

Second, the markets for NFTs must be open and accessible by any application. As Uniswap demonstrated in DeFi, crypto-native assets demand crypto-native (on-chain) markets. This will become only more important as the same NFTs are integrated permissonlessly by developers across a wide array of applications. Rather than fragmenting liquidity for each NFT, every application will want to access a shared, global, and composable liquidity pool. In this world, every application inherently becomes a marketplace for the NFTs it surfaces, whether the future Instagram, Spotify, or Fortnite.