Exclusive Interview: Binance Executive Discusses NFTs in 2022

Key Insights:

• Head of Binance NFT, Helen Hai believes by the end of 2022, NFTs will integrate with more real-world events.
• Facebook’s entry into the Metaverse would create significant competition.
• NFT user base grew by 2,416% in 2021, but the same might not happen this year.

In an exclusive interview shared with FXEmpire, Helen Hai, Head of Binance NFT, the payment platform for the world’s biggest cryptocurrency exchange Binance, spoke about the role of Metaverse and NFTs in the world.

She also talked about the implications of this growth on the decentralized aspect of crypto.

Boom Goes Metaverse!

The explosion of interest and investment into the virtual world managed to drive in big names. Everyone has been trying to get into this space, ranging from sports clubs to musical artists.

But while they intend on participating in the decentralized virtual world, others prefer to rather own it.

Facebook’s announcement of renaming its parent company to Meta was a step in that direction. With significant domination over the social media market already, Meta has the tools, time, and money to pull this off.

However, Helen Hai believes that decentralized options (Decentraland, The Sandbox) would trump centralized options due to their various benefits, including greater privacy, security, and control. Adding to the same, she said,

“Big corporations with more resources would naturally be able to drive and implement wider mass adoption of their centralized platform. Their platforms are also more user-friendly than most decentralized platforms presently, which is a barrier for new users.

However, we have observed the rise of more decentralized operators gaining popularity due to their benefits, including greater privacy, security, and control. This might help to spur traction and create more opportunities to grow the user base of decentralized platforms.”

While Facebook and other major media corporations are yet to reveal their plans for the Metaverse, it is uncertain whether they would gain domination if they joined in.

NFTs in 2022

While discussing what the NFT space could look like towards the end of this year, Helen Hai stated,

“By the end of 2022, we believe NFTs will have become a household name… I believe we’ll begin to see more NFTs that integrate into real-world events. While NFTs started as static images, real-world integrations like weather and stock data or any other real-world data can flow into NFTs and impact the NFT itself. “

But beyond speculation, NFTs could witness significant growth this year. It is a different discussion whether or not it would be as much as it did in 2021.

Between January and December 2021, the user base for these Non-Fungible Tokens observed a 2,416% growth. At the same time, NFT sales jumped from $8 million in January 2021 to almost $5 billion by January 2022.

But since the recent bearish market has kept the NFT market subdued for the first quarter of this year, the following three quarters will have to make up for this loss. If that doesn’t happen, then this speculation would remain mere speculation.