Tokenization of Art, Gaming, and the Future of NFTs | Opinion

CryptoNews · 2024-05-25T11:23:02.000Z

Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of crypto.news’ editorial. This is Part Three of a three-part series interview with William Quigley, a cryptocurrency and blockchain investor and co-founder of WAX and Tether, conducted by Selva Ozelli exclusively for crypto.news. Part One is about Sam Bankman-Fried’s and Changpeng Zhao’s prison sentences. Part Two is about cryptocurrency and banking. Part Three is about the future of NFTs. You might also like: Crypto and banking: tokenization of the global financial system is yet to come | Opinion 1) In Part One of our interview, you mentioned that you co-founded Worldwide Asset eXchange (WAX), the first decentralized marketplace for trading video game virtual items. Tell us about WAX.io, the number one web3 gaming platform. WAX was built specifically to handle the demands of blockchain gamers and NFT collectors. We initially built WAX on the Ethereum blockchain; however, the platform’s exorbitant gas fees and slowness led us to develop the WAX blockchain and wallet. WAX blockchain has the largest NFT ecosystem, with over 250 million NFT assets and more than 30,000 dApps at NFT projects. The WAX platform handles more than 23 million transactions per day for more than 30,000 dApps and 15 million users. Wax blockchain is ultra-fast, secure, and carbon-neutral. As the world’s leading blockchain for NFTs, dApps, and digital gaming, based on the number of daily active users, WAX was designed from the ground up to be eco-friendly. Our carbon-neutral status isn’t just a claim—it’s certified by Climate Care, demonstrating our dedication to maintaining a minimal environmental footprint. This Earth Day, we launched the Earthen WAX Walker NFT drop. For every Earthen Walker NFT claimed, WAX will plant a tree. This initiative combines our passion for innovative digital collectibles with tangible actions to benefit our planet, offering a collection of exclusive digital art that will allow us to contribute to reforestation efforts globally. 2) A 2023 crypto analysis firm dappGambl report found that 95% of NFTs are worth practically nothing. The report found that following the immense hype over NFTs between 2021 and 2022, around 79% of all NFT collections have remained unsold. The popular Bored Yacht Ape NFT values are down around 90% from market highs. As the NFT markets crashed at the end of 2021, I wrote that NFTs were here to stay. What are your views on the future of NFTs? According to Zion Market Research, the NFT market size was valued at $36.12 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach $217.07 billion by the end of 2032, showing a compound annual growth rate of around 22.05% from 2024 to 2032. Non-fungible token industry prospective | Source: Zion Market Research The global NFT market cap today is $68.68 Billion, a +1.12% change in the last 24 hours. I expect most of this growth to be in utility NFTs, collectible NFTs, and web3 gaming NFTs. 3) In 2021, art NFTs seemed like the biggest disrupter in art, with artists minting, exhibiting, and auctioning and investors buying, selling, and trading art NFTs. Nicole Sales Giles, VP and director of digital art sales of Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s, said, “At Christie’s, we view Digital Art as simply another collecting category of contemporary art. The web3 art community is collaboratively building something very special. I believe that in the future, the art world will look back on today’s camaraderie of artists, builders, curators, and collectors as the time ‘when it all started.” What are your thoughts and views about the future of art NFTs? The art market dropped 4% last year to $65 billion a year globally, with a few art sales making up the bulk of that number. Art NFTs are likely to be handled by global art businesses like Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips. At WAX, we focus on collectible NFTs and game NFTs with high trading volume by owners. We hope our collectible Earthen WAX Walker NFT drop generates intense collector interest so we can plant many trees. 4) Gains from collectible NFTs are being taxed at a 28% rate, which is higher than current capital gains rates. What are your thoughts on the higher tax rate applied to collectible NFTs? And will the higher tax rate hinder NFT collectible investment? The global collectibles market—valued at more than $360 billion in 2020—is expected to grow at a significant rate of around 4% during the forecast period 2022-2028. Therefore, the 28% higher tax rate shows that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) anticipates much growth in the collectible NFT sales area and would like to tax it at a higher tax rate than the current capital gains rate. Global collectibles market | Source: UnivDatos 5) The IRS recently issued the 1099-DA form in draft form. Jonathan Cutler, senior manager in Deloitte’s Washington National Tax team advising on information reporting of digital assets, said, “Under the August 2023 proposed digital asset reporting regulations, an NFT is included as reportable when it is a ‘digital representation of value that is recorded on a cryptographically secured distributed ledger (or any similar technology).’ In April, the draft form on which an NFT or other digital asset might be reported—the Form 1099-DA—was published by the IRS. Importantly, the cover page notes that this early draft release is based only on the proposed regulations and subject to change based on the public comments, the volume of which appears to be significant. Until those comments are digested by the IRS and Treasury, it’s difficult to glean meaningful information, whether from this draft form or otherwise, on the final scope of the definition of “digital asset” for reporting purposes.” Do you have any comments on the draft 1099-DA form which applies to NFTs? If the draft 1099-DA is finalized in its current form, then NFT markets will need to issue 1099-DA’s. Afterall, collectible NFTs are taxed at a higher rate. 6) A new NFT project takes cannabis sales out of the dark web markets and brings it into the NFT markets. Cannabis billionaire Maximillian White, who is often referred to as the ‘Elon Musk of cannabis,’ said, “I signed a partnership agreement with UK rapper Fredo just weeks after his Dubai prison release to launch first-of-its-kind Dr. Green NFTs sold at my own NFT drgreennft.com market place which will allow holders of the Ethereum based NFTs to sell recreational cannabis legally worldwide. The global cannabis market value is expected to reach approximately $33 billion by 2024 end and hit over $69 Billion by 2029 with a compounded AGR of 15.4%.” Do you have any thoughts or comments on this first-of-its-kind cannabis NFT initiative? No comments. 7) NFTs appear to be the next wave of SEC enforcement actions in the digital asset space. Last year, the SEC classified two NFT projects as securities. In August 2023, the SEC charged Impact Theory, LLC, a media and entertainment company headquartered in Los Angeles, with conducting an unregistered offering of crypto asset securities in the form of NFTs. Impact Theory raised approximately $30 million from hundreds of investors through the offering by claiming to be the next Disney Company—your ex-employer. Two weeks later, in September 2023, the SEC charged and entered into a settlement with Stoner Cats 2, LLC (SC2), finding that SC2’s NFT offering, which raised $8 million called Stoner Cats, was a security, and therefore SC2 had engaged in an unregistered offering of a security. What are your views on SEC’s enforcement actions in the NFT area? I was not aware of the SEC’s two settlements with NFT projects, the next Disney Company and the animated web series called Stoner Cats by Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher. However, it seems to me that in these two cases, the NFT offering documents were poorly drafted by their lawyers. The top three things that could give rise to NFT’s securities classification are fractionalizing an NFT, offering passive revenues, or participating in governance—such as staking. So, the SEC found that these NFTs were offered and sold to investors as investment contracts and, therefore, were securities. Accordingly, these NFT projects violated the federal securities laws by offering and selling NFTs to the public in an unregistered offering that was not otherwise exempt from registration. Given the regulatory compliance involved in issuing securities, that classification should be avoided, and the features, offering documents of an NFT should be carefully considered before launch. 8) The vast majority of existing NFT projects across art, gaming, sports, metaverses, and even cannabis are built on Ethereum blockchain. In April, the SEC issued a Wells notice to Ethereum-based Consensys, revealing that the agency could take potential action against Consensys for violating the federal securities laws through its MetaMask Staking and other products. The SEC seeks to regulate ETH as a security after Ethereum successfully changed its consensus mechanism by transitioning from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake back in September 2022. This view is also shared by the New York State Attorney General’s Office (NYAG), which, ahead of the SEC on March 9, 2023, filed a lawsuit charging crypto trading platform KuCoin for “failing to register as a securities and commodities broker-dealer and falsely representing itself as an exchange” notably alleging that the ETH traded on the platform is a security. The BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated he isn’t worried about the SEC classifying Ethereum’s ETH as a security. What are your thoughts about the potential classification of ETH as a security? How will this impact the NFT market? No comment. Read more: A rewarding ecosystem enables monetizing passion in web3 | Opinion

披露：此处表达的观点和意见仅属于作者，不代表 crypto.news 编辑部的观点和意见。
这是 Selva Ozelli 为 crypto.news 独家进行的对加密货币和区块链投资者、WAX 和 Tether 联合创始人 William Quigley 的三部分系列采访的第三部分。第一部分是关于 Sam Bankman-Fried 和赵长鹏的监禁。第二部分是关于加密货币和银行业务。第三部分是关于 NFT 的未来。
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1) 在我们采访的第一部分中，您提到您与他人共同创立了 Worldwide Asset eXchange (WAX)，这是首个用于交易视频游戏虚拟物品的去中心化市场。请向我们介绍一下排名第一的 web3 游戏平台 WAX.io。
WAX 专为满足区块链游戏玩家和 NFT 收藏家的需求而构建。我们最初在以太坊区块链上构建了 WAX；然而，该平台高昂的 Gas 费用和缓慢的速度促使我们开发了 WAX 区块链和钱包。
WAX 区块链拥有最大的 NFT 生态系统，拥有超过 2.5 亿个 NFT 资产和超过 30,000 个 NFT 项目的 dApp。WAX 平台每天为超过 30,000 个 dApp 和 1500 万用户处理超过 2300 万笔交易。Wax 区块链速度超快、安全且碳中性。
作为全球领先的 NFT、dApp 和数字游戏区块链，根据每日活跃用户数量来看，WAX 从一开始就被设计为环保型区块链。我们的碳中和状态不仅仅是一种说法——它得到了 Climate Care 的认证，表明我们致力于保持最小的环境足迹。
今年世界地球日，我们推出了 Earthen WAX Walker NFT。每认领一个 Earthen Walker NFT，WAX 就会种一棵树。这项计划将我们对创新数字收藏品的热情与造福地球的切实行动结合起来，提供一系列独家数字艺术，让我们能够为全球的重新造林工作做出贡献。
2）2023 年加密分析公司 dappGambl 的一份报告发现，95% 的 NFT 几乎一文不值。报告发现，在 2021 年至 2022 年 NFT 大肆宣传之后，大约 79% 的 NFT 收藏品仍未售出。流行的 Bored Yacht Ape NFT 价值较市场高点下跌了约 90%。随着 NFT 市场在 2021 年底崩盘，我写道 NFT 将继续存在。您对 NFT 的未来有何看法？
根据 Zion Market Research 的数据，2023 年 NFT 市场规模价值 361.2 亿美元，预计到 2032 年底将达到 2170.7 亿美元，2024 年至 2032 年的复合年增长率约为 22.05%。
非同质化代币行业前景 | 资料来源：Zion Market Research
今天全球 NFT 的市值为 686.8 亿美元，过去 24 小时内变化了 +1.12%。我预计大部分增长将来自实用型 NFT、收藏型 NFT 和 web3 游戏 NFT。
3) 2021 年，艺术 NFT 似乎是艺术领域最大的颠覆者，艺术家们铸造、展览和拍卖，投资者们购买、出售和交易艺术 NFT。佳士得战后及当代艺术副总裁兼数字艺术品销售总监 Nicole Sales Giles 表示：“在佳士得，我们将数字艺术视为当代艺术的另一个收藏类别。web3 艺术社区正在合作构建一些非常特别的东西。我相信，在未来，艺术界会回顾今天艺术家、建造者、策展人和收藏家之间的情谊，将其视为‘一切开始的时候’。”您对艺术 NFT 的未来有何想法和看法？
去年，全球艺术品市场规模下降 4%，至每年 650 亿美元，其中大部分来自少数艺术品销售。艺术品 NFT 可能会由佳士得、苏富比和菲利普斯等全球艺术品企业处理。
在 WAX，我们专注于所有者交易量大的可收藏 NFT 和游戏 NFT。我们希望我们的可收藏 Earthen WAX Walker NFT 能够引起收藏家的浓厚兴趣，这样我们就可以种植许多树。
4) 可收藏 NFT 的收益按 28% 的税率征税，高于目前的资本利得税率。您对可收藏 NFT 适用的更高税率有何看法？更高的税率会阻碍 NFT 收藏品投资吗？
全球收藏品市场（2020 年价值超过 3600 亿美元）预计在 2022-2028 年预测期内将以约 4% 的显著速度增长。因此，28% 的较高税率表明美国国税局 (IRS) 预计收藏品 NFT 销售领域将有很大增长，并希望以高于当前资本利得税率的税率对其征税。
全球收藏品市场 | 来源：UnivDatos 5）美国国税局最近发布了 1099-DA 表格草案。德勤华盛顿国家税务团队高级经理 Jonathan Cutler 负责数字资产信息报告，他表示：“根据 2023 年 8 月提出的数字资产报告法规，当 NFT 是‘记录在加密保护的分布式账本（或任何类似技术）上的价值的数字表示’时，它就被纳入报告范围。 4 月，美国国税局发布了可以报告 NFT 或其他数字资产的草案表格——1099-DA 表格。重要的是，封面指出，此早期草案仅基于拟议的法规，并可能根据公众意见而发生变化，公众意见的数量似乎很大。在美国国税局和财政部消化这些意见之前，很难从这份草案表格或其他表格中收集到有关“数字资产”定义最终范围的有意义的信息，以供报告之用。”您对适用于 NFT 的 1099-DA 表格草案有什么意见吗？
如果 1099-DA 草案以目前的形式最终确定，那么 NFT 市场将需要发行 1099-DA。毕竟，可收藏的 NFT 的税率更高。
6）一个新的 NFT 项目将大麻销售从暗网市场带入 NFT 市场。大麻亿万富翁马克西米利安·怀特（Maximillian White）通常被称为“大麻界的埃隆·马斯克”，他说：“我在英国说唱歌手弗雷多从迪拜监狱获释几周后与他签署了合作协议，将在我自己的 NFT drgreennft.com 市场上推出首创的 Dr. Green NFT，这将允许以太坊 NFT 持有者在全球范围内合法销售娱乐大麻。预计到 2024 年底，全球大麻市场价值将达到约 330 亿美元，到 2029 年将超过 690 亿美元，复合年增长率为 15.4%。”您对这种首创的大麻 NFT 计划有什么想法或评论吗？
暂无评论。
7）NFT 似乎是 SEC 在数字资产领域的下一波执法行动。去年，SEC 将两个 NFT 项目归类为证券。2023 年 8 月，SEC 指控总部位于洛杉矶的媒体和娱乐公司 Impact Theory, LLC 以 ​​NFT 的形式进行未经注册的加密资产证券发行。Impact Theory 通过此次发行从数百名投资者那里筹集了约 3000 万美元，声称自己是下一个迪士尼公司——你的前雇主。两周后，即 2023 年 9 月，SEC 指控 Stoner Cats 2, LLC (SC2) 并与其达成和解，认定 SC2 的 NFT 发行筹集了 800 万美元，名为 Stoner Cats，是一种证券，因此 SC2 从事了未经注册的证券发行。您对 SEC 在 NFT 领域的执法行动有何看法？
我不知道美国证券交易委员会与 NFT 项目达成的两项和解，即下一家迪士尼公司以及米拉·库尼斯和阿什顿·库彻的动画网络连续剧《Stoner Cats》。
然而，在我看来，在这两起案件中，NFT 发行文件都是由他们的律师起草的，写得很糟糕。可能导致 NFT 被归类为证券的三大因素是：NFT 的分割、提供被动收入或参与治理（例如质押）。因此，SEC 发现这些 NFT 是作为投资合同向投资者提供和出售的，因此属于证券。因此，这些 NFT 项目违反了联邦证券法，通过未经注册的发行向公众提供和出售 NFT，而这种发行并不免于注册。
考虑到发行证券所涉及的监管合规问题，应避免这种分类，并在推出之前仔细考虑 NFT 的特征和发行文件。
8）现有的艺术、游戏、体育、元宇宙甚至大麻领域的绝大多数 NFT 项目都是基于以太坊区块链构建的。今年 4 月，SEC 向以太坊公司的 Consensys 发出了威尔斯通知，透露该机构可能会对 Consensys 通过其 MetaMask Staking 和其他产品违反联邦证券法的行为采取行动。早在 2022 年 9 月，以太坊成功从工作量证明过渡到权益证明，改变了其共识机制后，SEC 就试图将 ETH 作为证券进行监管。纽约州总检察长办公室 (NYAG) 也持这种观点，该办公室于 2023 年 3 月 9 日抢在 SEC 之前提起诉讼，指控加密交易平台 KuCoin“未能注册为证券和大宗商品经纪自营商并虚假地将自己表现为交易所”，并声称该平台上交易的 ETH 是一种证券。贝莱德首席执行官 Larry Fink 表示，他并不担心 SEC 将以太坊的 ETH 归类为证券。您对于将 ETH 归类为证券有何看法？这将如何影响 NFT 市场？
没有意见。
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