The rise of NFT adoption in India

NFTs are commonly recalled as the Non-fungible tokens that are regarded as modern-day collectibles. The digital assets space has expanded to a $2 trillion+ market with over 200 million users interacting with them today. They represent the potential to improve and expand multiple sectors and lead to the creation of new asset classes.

In India too, NFTs have garnered attention with conversations around NFTs being on a steady rise and numerous NFT marketplaces being launched on Indian crypto exchanges. The NFT market today has already found its niche in finance, investing, gaming and entertainment industries at large and are steadily growing to penetrate and optimize more such traditional sectors. NFTs are available for purchase and sale online, with digital evidence of ownership of any items included. There are several use cases growing among both the industry and consumers in India and globally.

NFTs are digital assets that can be used to represent ownership of digital and physical items using blockchain platforms. There are startups that are creating marketplaces… of course, large exchanges like WazirX are doing it, and there are others who are creating a very intelligent layer on top to create mechanisms for NFTs to interact with things like games.

A lot of bigger companies and even organized media players are keenly looking at this space. Even large industrial houses and banks are interested in implementing NFTs. Up until last year, a small fraction of investors saw the actual potential in NFTs but 2021 led to a complete u-turn as the market opened up to massive NFT pitches with a record $2.5 billion sales globally.

As per Google trends data, in August 2021, global interest for NFT rose by 426% with people showing a lot of interest in terms of buying NFTs. We feel that this new fad isn't going to end anytime soon, there are growing use cases of NFTs with Twitter recently announcing NFT profile verification as an upcoming feature. In fact, in the past quarter, there has been a significant increase in NFT pitches with its adoption at an all-time high in India.

Various celebrities, global artists and athletes too are joining in the NFT wagon, with prominent Indian stars like Amitabh Bachhan launching his NFT with BeyondLif.club, Salman Khan with BollyCoin. There has been news around southern star Rajnikanth too coming up with his own NFT. I believe there is a massive opportunity in the digital space for early adopters with NFT gaining humongous popularity and becoming mainstream as the profits can be exceedingly high.