Will ERC-6551 Revolutionize NFT Ownership?

My kids have a delightful little book titled, “What Can a Crane Pick Up?”, and while reading it to them, it’s always fun to land on the page where it asks, “Can a crane pick up a crane?” The answer: “It could!” Alongside, is an illustration of two cute construction hoists smiling at each other like father and son. 

This is always followed by me saying, “Whoa, meta”, which is exactly how I reacted when I read the EIP for ERC-6551 which outlines a proposal that aims to give any NFT a smart contract which allows it to own other NFTs, which in turn, can own other NFT’s.  If you’d like to understand it better, or if you’re masochistic, you can read the EIP directly.

Now, if you’re getting the Leonardo DiCaprio dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream vibe here, hang on.  While this could lead to an OpenSea Inception, there’s actually some great utility here.  Let’s look at a few use-cases.

Gaming

The idea of NFTs in gaming is a popular topic for some very good reasons.  If you’ve ever spent hours (or years) acquiring gaming assets by ascending through levels, defeating bosses, solving challenging puzzles, or in many cases purchasing them with a credit card, you know how painful it is when you either lose interest in the game and move on, or a gaming company shuts down their servers, stops providing updates or discontinues a game entirely. 

With the promise of your assets becoming NFTs, this solves a few problems.  First, all that loot you’ve acquired can be transferred or sold (without getting you banned for breaking the terms-of-service) to other players just discovering the game or playing on older consoles.  Secondly, with the advent of metaverse platforms, your characters, weapons, skins, car parts, emotes, etc., can potentially be used in other games or environments.  

With ERC-6551, this could make things a whole lot more interesting.  For instance, imagine being able to loan out weapons or vehicles, rent them out to other players, set-up armories or garages for a guild or group, or transferring entire sets of connected, leveled-up assets to other players or platforms.  Players could potentially build up valuable collections of objects and abilities to develop rare combinations.  Opportunities for artistic expression could allow participants to develop unique in-game economies and benefit financially from their in-game creations.

Real-World Assets

Imagine NFTs representing not only your digital portfolio, but also real-world assets that can be tokenized as NFTs such as real estate, vehicles, physical collectibles, memberships, fractional investments, usage rights, artifacts, policies, portfolios and carbon credits.  

One example considering utility with ERC-6551 is short-term vacation rentals, an entire industry that’s been disrupted in relatively recent history by companies such as AirBnB, Vrbo, Vacasa, HipCamp, etc.  What if you could tokenize access to rental properties in a way that makes it possible for them to be traded. 

For instance, 365 NFTs could be created for access to a villa in San Juan, one for each day of the year.  These could be combined into sets of weekends, weeks or months, then be listed, auctioned, broken-up or traded as individual NFTs or packages. They could be broken down even further into individual rooms and sold or traded with friends, much like you’d split a bill on Venmo.  Travelers could swap access to one property with access to another –all done on an open, decentralized exchange.

Intellectual Property

NFTs are already being used to tokenize Intellectual Property such as art, music, film, etc., and the adoption of ERC-6551 could add additional value to the ownership of these and other intellectual assets in a variety of ways.  Consider buying an edition of a magazine (or Gazette, ahem).  By purchasing that magazine as an NFT, you could automatically become the  owner of several “nested” NFTs, which could include assets such as artwork, audio tracks, coupons, vouchers or even… a ticket to a private event at NFC Lisbon next week –just sayin’.    

These are just a few examples.  Lots of opportunity here for this ERC. Let us know what you think on the Redlion Twitter or Discord, or in person at NFC Lisbon on June 8-9.