Henry O’Connor

The key to harnessing the ownership power of NFTs: the need for standardised decentralisation protocols

NFT technology first raised interest because it offered potential to restore full ownership to digital property, which has been restricted in the centralised paradigm since the birth of the internet. However, in the current highly fragmented NFT ecosystem, we need robust standardised protocol systems that guarantee full decentralisation of the token and the underlying asset to consistently deliver on the original NFT promise of full ownership and control. Most NFT projects fail to do this – the underlying asset is not sufficiently decentralised and thus remains vulnerable to manipulation by the centralised issuer, which has damaged application, interoperability, and general consumer interest. In the dot-com era, establishing the PCI DSS security protocol to hold payment providers such as PayPal to high standards of consumer protection revived trust in online commerce that was originally rampant with fraud. Similarly, a flagship decentralisation protocol that requires NFTs to ensure that full ownership and control of the underlying asset passes with a sale will lower information costs for the consumer and increase the opportunity to scale applications of NFTs to high impact use cases beyond cartoon apes.