By Jesse Robitaille
This column originally appeared in Canadian Stamp News (Vol. 45 #26) in April 2021 as the final piece in a two-part series exploring traditional stamp collecting and its benefits through the lens of philately's future.
In recent years, digital assets (like cryptocurrencies and crypto-collectibles) have proven to be legitimate stores of value similar to tangible assets (like traditional postage stamps).
According to U.S. billionaire Mark Cuban – a childhood collector and dealer who learned valuable financial lessons in the stamp business – there are no signs this asset digitization will slow down.
Today’s stamp collectors and dealers stand at the cusp of philately’s future, and major changes are expected in the near future. In many ways, the shift is already underway. Traditional collectors might balk at the concept of a crypto-stamp – a digital “tokenized” asset existing in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT) – but I think this new form of collectible will find firm footing in philately and other collecting hobbies.
I’ve covered NFTs sparingly in CSN before (“Austria’s ‘crypto’ stamp a first for any government,” Vol. 44 #7), but they’re having a big moment right now, so it deserves another look. With all the recent hype surrounding the blockchain, cryptocurrencies and app-based investing, let’s see how it relates to stamps and philately.
WHAT IS AN NFT?
To recap, while cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are fungible (i.e., interchangeable) because each unit carries the same monetary value, NFTs represent something unique (i.e., they each have a different “value”).
This characteristic allows NFTs to be used to regulate and verify digital scarcity in crypto-collecting and crypto-gaming.
I always use the crypto-collecting game CryptoKitty as a simple example. Users breed, sell, purchase and collect virtual cats existing as NFTs, which are essentially uniquely verifiable digital files backed by the blockchain (a digital public ledger for transactions). Each virtual cat is unique, owned by one user and vulnerable to the ups and downs of that specific market. What’s most shocking is several CryptoKitties have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The market for crypto-collectibles – whether it’s a virtual cat, stamp or another digital asset – has shown unprecedented strength this year.
You may have heard Kings of Leon became the first band to release an album as an NFT this March. Fine artists and even social-media users are entering the NFT scene, too. Anything digital (like a video, an image or even a tweet) can be tokenized into an NFT and offered on a marketplace for whatever price the seller finds appropriate. Anyone can bid for a chance to own the NFT, and the ultimate value will rest on the seller and buyer – just like with tangible assets.
This one is sure to shock you: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet – the first one ever sent across the Twitter platform – as an NFT. It sold for $2.9 million US (about $3.65 million Cdn.).
This could mark the beginning of all digital assets moving over to the blockchain, and it’s a sign of another forthcoming offshoot to traditional philately. The learning curve is steep, and it’s just about the furthest thing from traditional stamp collecting, but this could very well be a part of philately’s future.
As I’ve mentioned, in some ways, that future is already here. Austria issued the first NFT stamp in 2019, and this was followed by several others, including a three-piece series from the United Nations Postal Administration in 2020.
Because of how NFTs operate, these crypto-stamps can be immediately verified against others (thank you, blockchain), and it opens the door to rarities, errors and more philatelic fun.
Who knows what’s to come, but could anyone before May 1840 have predicted how stamp collecting would grow over the following 180 years?
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