Why You’ll Care About ‘Monkey Tech’ After All: Digital Goods, Real Power, and the Case for Ownership Online.

I wonder how many people will not read, or even open, this newsletter because we are going to talk about NFT’s 🤣. But, we have to.. One of the reasons I am liking this long form format of articles and my newsletter so much, is that it gives me the opportunity to properly explain things instead of having to fit it all in one (very algho optimized) LinkedIn posts.

The reason why I decided that this week is the moment to talk about NFT’s is because I saw multiple posts going on viral on LinkedIn, “dunking” on NFT’s with a bunch of miss information. Similar openings sentences such as: this monkey was once worth $550k and is now worth less than two bags of Doritos.

People who have laughed out loud about the NFT mania and, yes very expensive, monkey pictures (aka the Bored Ape Yacht Club) love these posts of course. These posts reaaaaally annoyed me, for several reasons:

1. The information is not correct, the current cheapest “monkey picture” is (still) 27.000 USD, serious money if you ask me.

2. Why hate, and kick them when their down, on people who took a bet and lost money, just for some likes.

3. The fact that exactly these posts, which are just false and don’t add any value, go viral on LinkedIn.

As a response, I wrote my own post about it (which of course didn’t go viral because who is interested in actual value 🤣)

Ok, enough hating, let’s talk about the actual innovation that happened behind all the craziness.

When the NFT mania was in full effect I strongly believed, and said out loud, that 95% of this will all go to zero. But I also strongly believed, and still do, that the technology itself is very important for our future.

Besides NFT’s there is also another word that everyone despises still: the metaverse. A concept that originated in Neal Stephenson's book years ago and all of a sudden exploded onto the public scene in 2020. The Metaverse was a concept that people and institutions described in all kinds of different ways. Facebook even decided to change their corporate entity to Meta, which really brought the madness to its peak. What is this? Why is everyone talking about it? Were the questions that we received at Monks.

In 2020 many people thought that the metaverse meant one big virtual world where everyone would spend most of their time. I never thought this is what the metaverse will mean. While we still debate what the metaverse really is, is it gaming, virtual reality, augmented reality, or something else, one thing remains clear for me: our digital lives are becoming increasingly more important. More virtual and the boundaries between digital and physical are disappearing faster than we think. Meetings, friendships, identities, they're all migrating online or are even solely living there. Not only that, AI is creating whole new dynamics and again speeding things up drastically.

In order to land my point in this article, I don’t need you to believe in “the metaverse” perse. I just need you to agree with the point that our lives will become more even digital, more virtual and more intertwined with the physical, than they already are. If you agree with that, by the end of this article, you will also agree with me that NFT technology is good for us. 👀 

Let’s start from scratch: What are NFTs and how do they work?

NFT stands for non-fungible token. It’s a unique digital asset stored on a blockchain, it’s a way to prove ownership and authenticity of a digital item. Unlike cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum (which are fungible, meaning each unit is the same), NFTs are one-of-a-kind. Think of them as a digital certificate of ownership that can’t be duplicated or faked. Proving digital ownership was not possible before blockchain technology.

It is important to start deleting a certain image from your mind. When I say NFT, I am not just talking about the typical Bored Apes you have seen everywhere. Digital art, is just one use case of what an NFT can be.

Because we are talking about something digital, we can do way more with this technology than just proof something. Therefore, what makes NFTs even more interesting:

• Programmable: You can attach smart contracts that pay royalties every time an NFT is resold.
• Interoperable: You can use or display NFTs across platforms, apps, or games that support them.
• Transparent: Everything is on-chain—who owns it, how much it sold for, what it links to.

People laughed when digital items, art, and so forth, got bought for thousands and even millions of dollars. Understandable. Now let’s move ahead in time and say we are in a world where 90% of our meetings are virtual, seeing real-life avatars in real-life environments. All of a sudden, what you wear in these environments, how your own environments look when you have people “over,” matters. Why do people buy brands in the physical world, why do people spend hard-earned money on material things to look good in front of others? Because it matters to us, because we want to show our identity to the people we meet, both personally and physically. Why wouldn’t this be the same in an online space?

We already see it with younger generations who would rather lose their physical toys than their virtual items on gaming platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite. How they show up to hang out with their friends in these worlds matters to them in a very deep way.

How real this is in terms of money? Fortnite is free-to-play, generating income only through player purchases of virtual goods: skins, emotes, the Battle Pass, etc. Epic Games reported a record $5.6 billion in revenue for Fortnite in 2018. The revenue for 2025 is expected to break that record as it could hit $6 billion.. Similar stats for Roblox as they estimate to hit $5.3 billion in in-game purchase revenue this year.

All this money being spend on digital items, there is no physical equivalent that comes with it whatsoever and you can only use it in that specific game. Now the crazy part, in my humble opinion, is that all these people don’t own anything they paid for.

If all these digital items are so emotionally, and sometimes financially, important to us (as I talked about in my New York Times quote), don’t we want to actually “own” them as we do in the real world?

At this moment, digital platforms are all siloed, meaning what you buy there, remains there. You pay for access to these items when you visit the platform. If we translate that to the physical world, it would kind of mean that if you go to the movies, you would wear a specific outfit for the movie, and as soon as you walk out of the cinema, someone at the exit will ask you for the clothes back. Because you don’t own it; it is owned by the company that provides you access to the theater and the outfit you are wearing for it.

This is where blockchain can make a difference; this is where NFT technology will make sure that in these ever-more-important virtual environments, we will actually own things and can hopefully even bring them to other environments as well.

Evolving Physical Assets

But the benefits of this technology go beyond the digital space as even physical products can be evolved using it. Buying and selling second-hand cars as an example. We all know that our cars are becoming more and more computers on wheels. Tesla runs full software updates remotely to all cars, giving them new abilities and functions without you even noticing.

Now let’s say you would like to buy a Tesla, second hand. Here is where currently a lot of trust comes into play because we will never know for sure if the things that the seller is saying about his Tesla are true or not. But what if all the information that matters is stored in an NFT, which is connected to the ID of the Tesla? How many kilometers, how many trips to the garage, how many upgrades (or lack thereof), how often it had issues, and so forth? All digital data that could automatically be updated into a dynamic NFT, storing all the data safe and secure. Anything stored on a blockchain as secure as Ethereum, will be unalterable, meaning the seller of the car could not have changed it to his or her own benefit.

This is what blockchain is here to do, you don’t need to trust anyone anymore on the internet. That might sound harsh, but it does feel like it’s for the better 😅.

NFC Chips and Blockchain, Fighting Fake Fashion

Another challenge that consumers often face is buying fashion items, either shoes, clothing, jewels, etc. There are two current challenges; 1) when exclusive items get released by a brand, how do you know how many items of the same shoe/dress/shirt were sold, and how do you know they won’t sell more in the future? 2) if you want to buy resale, or second-hand items, how do you know it is real? In both examples, blockchain is offering a solution. NFC chips are chips that can be added to any fashion item, which can be scanned and linked to an NFT. Meaning that if you see an item, all you have to do is hold your phone against it to verify both its authenticity and to see how many similar items there are available in the world. Again, taking out the trust you now need in a reseller or in the fashion brand that they won’t make more of the same later on.

The resale industry, which is worth billions yearly, already showed another added value of blockchain. StockX, the largest reseller for streetwear with over 50 million items sold, introduced blockchain in order to downgrade their environmental impact due to shipping packages. A lot of exclusive sneakers, or fashion items, get bought as investments to later sell them for a profit. This is a true trading business and people don’t wear the items they buy, they wait until they rise in value so they can sell them on. So why ship them? That is why StockX introduced their “Vault” concept where you could buy an NFT that gave you the right to a particular item. If you want the item physically, you can redeem it and get it at any time. If you don’t, you just wait until the price rises, and you resell the NFT to the next person. Because of the technology, it is a safe way to trade these physical items but it saves a lot of carbon emissions as the NFTs don’t have to be shipped physically.

There is more, but I won’t drag this on too long 🤣.

In short:

• Digital identity: Your wallet becomes your passport online. Your NFTs represent memberships, credentials, diplomas (I honestly have no idea where my physical diploma’s are, would have much rather had NFTs for them!)
• Ticketing: Concert tickets that can’t be faked, scalped, or lost. Companies like Guts (Dutch), Tokenproof and YellowHeart are already doing this.
• Media and IP: Musicians and filmmakers are experimenting with NFT ownership models that let fans invest directly in projects, and get paid if they succeed.

As AI accelerates, the lines between real and virtual will blur further. We’ll live in hybrid realities: physical spaces layered with digital content, AI assistants managing our data, and avatars attending meetings on our behalf.

In that world:

• Who owns your digital identity?
• Who controls the art you create, the spaces you build, the work you do?
• How do you prove that something you made is actually yours?

NFT tech gives us the infrastructure to answer those questions. It’s not perfect. It’s still clunky. But it’s foundational.

Did I expect more from RTFKT and the whole Nike acquisition (they shut down fyi 😢 )? Absolutely. Did I loose money and I am sad their vision did not became a reality? Absolutely. Doesn’t mean I stopped believing in this technology.

So let’s stop judging an entire technology by its worst use cases.

Yes, some people bought JPEGs and lost money. But others used that same tech to authenticate exlusive sneakers, secure digital IDs, or build next-gen gaming programs. That’s the point: the NFT was never the product, it was the infrastructure. And we’re only just starting to build on top of it.

Think about how often you’ve heard this story before: “The early version looked like a joke, until it didn’t.” (anyone remember the “iBeer app” on the first iPhone? 🤣)

If our lives are going more digital, we’re going to need ways to own, trade, prove, and carry our assets into that world. NFTs, whether we keep calling them that or not, are still one of the best technologies we have for that.

So, next time someone dunks on “monkey pictures,” ask them what part of the internet they actually own.

And if they can’t answer, maybe they should’ve opened this newsletter after all. 😉 

Much love to all and thanks again for reading! ❤️ 

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^{Who am I and why you should be here:}

^{Over the years, I’ve navigated industries like advertising, music, sports, and gaming, always chasing what’s next and figuring out how to make it work for brands, businesses, and myself. From strategizing for global companies to experimenting with the latest tech, I’ve been on a constant journey of learning and sharing.}

^{This newsletter is where I’ll bring all of that together—my raw thoughts, ideas, and emotions about AI, blockchain, gaming, Gen Z & Alpha, and life in general. No perfection, just me being as real as it gets.}

^{Every week (or whenever inspiration hits), I’ll share what’s on my mind: whether it’s deep dives into tech, rants about the state of the world, or random experiments that I got myself into. The goal? To keep it valuable, human, and worth your time.}