A Study of Social Acceptability of NFTs

In 2022, the Japanese government is strongly proposing to focus on developing the Web3 industry. The government is exploring the use of NFTs to commercialize content such as Japanese animations and games as Web3 businesses. NFT (Non-Fungible Token) means "unique and non-substitutable data unit recorded in blockchain". NFT indicates the owner of digital content by linking the NFT with digital content such as image or audio data. On the other hand, NFTs are constructed using complex technologies such as “blockchain” and “smart contracts”. For this reason, many people do not understand the technical mechanism of NFTs. There are also aspects of excessive expectations for NFTs based on misunderstandings. I think that the bubble caused by excessive expectations negatively affects the development of technology. Therefore, in this research, I investigated what kind of value people find after understanding the mechanism of NFTs. Also, based on the survey, I find the functions desired for NFTs. Specifically, I made a video for non-technical people to easy to understand how NFTs work. And I showed the non-technical people the video with a demonstration of NFT tampering. After showing the video to the viewers, I surveyed them to investigate how their understanding of NFTs and the perceived value of NFTs changed. As a result, people understood that NFTs were not used as keys to access contents, but rather as a way to brag about what the holders had.