(1) Birth of Virtual Currency :

Virtual currency was born in October 2008, a year after the Lehman Brothers collapse (2007), when a person named Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper on the Internet entitled “A Payment System without a Central Manager Using Blockchain Technology.

This was due to a slump in “money” (currencies such as the dollar and the yen). It was born out of a punk mentality that asked if it was possible to create “money” (said to be decentralized) that would be supported by everyone, rather than centralized money issued by the state. In national money, the state is behind the credit. However, the existence of physical money is becoming increasingly scarce as the digital society progresses.

◆Reference [Questions answered! In the cashless era, who is making the money?
http://spdy.jp/news/s12484/

This is where virtual currency was born. In order for the digital number “1” to have the value of one yen, it becomes “one yen” if everyone has confidence in it. This confidence process is called mining. Just as two bananas are worth two yen if society believes that a banana is worth one yen, a banana becomes “money” if everyone believes in it and makes a commitment to it. The digital interpretation of this idea is virtual currency. It is called “decentralized money” because it is based on the trust of everyone, not the state.

Now, just as there are dollars, yen, and euros of national money, there are many types of virtual currencies. The most famous is Bitcoin. When Elon Musk said you could buy Tesla with virtual currency, it went up in value; the NFT uses the second most circulated currency, Ethereum (ETH).
1 ETH = about 320,000 yen. (As of September 25, 2021) It reached 440,000 yen in May, but was less than 100,000 yen at the beginning of the year. The market is that volatile.

If you want to make a virtual currency account, we recommend the following.
Japanese domestic
bitFlyer = SBIinvestment, Mitsubishi UFJ Capital Co.
Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Capital, Dentsu Digital Holdings Inc.
coincheck = 100% Monex Group
GMO Coin = GMO Group
DMM Bitcoin = DMM.com group company
Unima = Subsidiary of Mobile Factory

global
Binance (Hong Kong capital)

(2) Birth of NFT:

Now, in 2017, nine years after the birth of that virtual currency, the NFT was born. The people doing virtual currency, like the people developing AI, are either punks or rich, or in any case, crazy people. They are trying to change society with ideas that are not considered by normal common sense. It can be the extremes of creation and destruction. I want you to understand the feeling that they are doing this playfully and with great energy.

People who pay $7.5 billion for mere digital art are playing with virtual passing, not stocks or bonds, because they are financiers as rich as it is pocket money and “not satisfied with the speed at which money makes money”. Also, DJ Steve Aoki buys graffiti of Japanese 8-year-olds for 800,000 yen a piece, he does it for fun. It’s not so much an asset as it is a Twitter icon. Both instagrams and LINE stamp purchases are, depending on how you think about it, just things that happen in the virtual world. However, it is not surprising that for Generation Z (currently around 6-25 years old), the virtual currency accumulated from game items and NFT games can amount to hundreds of millions of yen without their knowledge. In real life, they may eat convenience store lunches, but in the virtual world (Metaverse), they want to dress up and go out in Gucci sneakers. I want you to know the value of such a sensation.

◆ Reference
What is the value of NFT art? How to answer the question “How to answer in one minute?
http://spdy.jp/news/s12696/

(3) NFT Marketplace expands

The NFT art is a unique work of digital art that can be certified as a digital work of art, and the history of how the work is resold in the future can be recorded and cannot be tampered with. In some cases, additional royalties can be paid to the original copyright holder for secondary distribution through resale.

So how do I buy NFT?

First, you need to create a virtual currency account. The number of domestic accounts in operation now is about 3 million. (Global 100 million accounts – 2020/9) Of those, only a few percent have ever bought NFTs. Then, the number of people who can actually buy NFTs in Japan is very small. It is important to lower the barrier as much as possible for people to understand the NFT. In order to lower this hurdle, some companies such as LINE have issued their own currency (BITMAX) and launched it by simplifying the wallet setup. But that doesn’t use Ethereum, so it can’t be used internationally. Soon there will be a feature that will allow wallets to be authenticated via Twitter, which will lower the hurdle for this wallet.

The NFT became known to the general public on March 11, 2021, so as of this writing, it has not yet been six months.

Major marketplaces to buy and sell NFTs
OpenSea is by far the top!

Monthly trading volume for September 2021
Total NFT market: 197 billion yen
OpenSea: 193 billion yen
SuperRare 1.3 billion yen
Foundation 1.2 billion yen
Nifty 1 billion yen