Beyond the JPEG
By 2024 the industry had moved past the image. The interesting NFTs aren't pictures anymore — they're tickets, memberships, receipts, certificates of authenticity, in-game items, and rails for royalties. The JPEG was the hook that made the infrastructure visible. The infrastructure is what actually matters.
For a business, an NFT is the cheapest way to issue a transferable claim on something: a seat at an event, a discount, a membership tier, a physical good in a warehouse somewhere. For an artist, it's the first format in history where secondary-sale royalties are enforced by the payment rail itself, not by a publisher's willingness to pay you.
What actually works for businesses
Ticketing. Membership. Loyalty programs where the point balance is itself transferable. Warranty certificates that survive resale. These are boring on purpose — they're the use cases where the NFT's properties (uniqueness, transferability, programmatic metadata) solve a real problem that CSV rows and databases don't.
What fails: trying to wedge NFTs into products where a database would work fine. The test I use: if you can't explain why a CSV wouldn't solve the problem, the NFT isn't adding anything.
What actually works for artists
Direct-to-audience release, with on-chain royalties on every resale. Editioned drops that behave like small-run prints but with verifiable scarcity. Community layers that use the NFT as a membership badge for Discords, events, future drops. Collaborations where the NFT is the connective tissue between two creators, with automatic royalty splits at the protocol level.
What fails: assuming the hype will come back. It won't, at least not in the 2021 shape. What remains is the rail itself, and it's strictly better than the PayPal-and-publisher stack that came before. That's the case to make to the artists in your life.