At last month’s Permissionless conference – the world’s largest metaverse and DeFi cultural event in Palm Beach, Florida – Chainlink Labs’ Lauren Halstead joined ZKSpace’s Isaac Lee, Parallel Finance’s Yubo Ruan, and Fractional’s Andy Chorlian for a discussion about “The Collision of NFTs and DeFi.” The panel explored current hot topics including borrowing and lending with NFTs, fractionalizing NFTs, and the intersection of NFTs, web3 games, and DeFi.
As the blockchain industry-standard decentralized oracle network, Chainlink provisions high-quality market data used to accurately price specific NFTs, as well as a growing spectrum of real-time data feeds powering dynamic NFTs that change to reflect real-world events like sports and weather. Halstead explained how Chainlink oracles are enabling new utility for NFTs within the concentric realms of gaming and DeFi using palpable analogies.
She distilled the appeal of being able to stake NFTs as financial assets within web3 games, so as to retain ownership of an NFT while selling its perks or benefits to someone else for any given time. This function is so fundamental to player-owned economies that it’s also in the blueprint of many NFTs.
“I think there’s huge room for growth for NFTs in the gaming space,” Halstead said. “A lot of the existing NFT projects out there are planning on entering into games. We know this is a long spectrum, so being able to stake that NFT right now in a game, even while it’s in development, is essential.”
She compared this to the static value of tangible collectibles like Pokémon cards. “I have a bunch of Pokémon cards ‘staking’ in my basement; I have no way to do anything with them,” she explained. If, for example, Halstead owned a Charizard card as an NFT granting access to exclusive events on par with an elite Bored Ape Yacht Club party, then she could sell a hypothetical ticket to the Pokémon World Championships without selling the NFT itself.
Halstead pointed out that selling an NFT’s utility could even enhance the value of that NFT, depending on the buyer. “Say I own a house that’s an NFT,” she said. “And say Snoop Dogg rents the house and it becomes a really famous house; all of a sudden, that house is worth more because of who stayed there and the dynamics around it. So as this keeps emerging, we’re going to see these applications translate to real-world assets.”
Watch the entire Permissionless panel, “The Collision of NFTs and DeFi.”