NFTs are used for the first time in court by UK judge

GB Market Commentary 22/07/2022

by Marcus Sotiriou

Bitcoin continues to make advancements towards the $26,000 resistance level, despite Bitcoin miners capitulating. Data from CryptoQuant shows that Bitcoin Miner Reserve has decreased dramatically over the past two weeks. This is likely as a result of miners not being able to cover operating expenses in an inflationary macro-economic environment, where energy prices have been increasing, hence being forced to sell Bitcoin. May miners have been forced to shut down, shown by biggest drop in computing power since China banned crypto mining last May.

NFTs are being used more in an institutional setting as a UK judge has given the go-ahead to serve legal documents over the blockchain ledger by a non-fungible token for the first time in history.

The ruling comes from a case brought by online gambling company founder Fabrizio D’Aloia, who is founder of an online gambling company, is suing cryptocurrency Binance and other platforms claim after his crypto assets were fraudulently cloned on the brokerages. D’Aloia will receive NFTs that represent legal documents via airdrops into two crypto wallets that have been previously used by D’Aloia.

Despite an increase institutional usage for NFTs such as this court in the UK is demonstrating, the largest NFT marketplace Opensea has announced it will lay off 20% of its staff. This follows prominent crypto company blockchain.com reducing 25% of its employees, and many other established crypto firms. According to co-founder and CEO Devin Finzer, this decision will allow OpenSea to better prepare for up to five years of a potentially “prolonged” crypto winter.

This demonstrates that retail who are the predominant users of OpenSea are showing little interest in NFTs at the moment, as the majority of NFTs currently on marketplaces have no real world utility, whilst institutions are recognising the wide impactful use cases that NFTs provide.

NFT marketplace has taken the market by storm since its launch less than two weeks ago though, with over 5,000 ETH (around $7.2 million) in trading volume. This more than double than Coinbase’s all-time NFT volume, according to data compiled by CoinDesk, which shows how underwhelming Coinbase’s NFT marketplace has been.