NFTs as Financial Ownership Infrastructure
Arjun Sethi, co-CEO of Kraken, on building the Nasdaq of crypto
The important point is that an NFT is less a collectible format than a wrapper for unique ownership. Once a token points to one specific item, ticket, membership, game object, or legal claim, it becomes a simple way to move that item between wallets and platforms. That is why the same rails that carried profile pictures can also carry digital access rights, collateralized loans, and real world assets packaged through trusts or other legal structures.
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Kraken itself framed NFTs as usable financial objects, not just art. Its marketplace launch emphasized custody, trading, creator payouts, and eventually lending style use cases, while its education materials described NFTs being pledged as collateral for loans. That points to NFTs working as portable records of ownership with financial utility.
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The market split between NFT technology and the 2021 collectible mania. Generalist marketplaces depended on heavy trading in art, membership passes, and speculative collections, then volumes collapsed. Even so, those same marketplaces were built around many asset types, which is evidence that the format itself was broader than the boom that first popularized it.
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The real extension is into tokenized securities and other off-chain assets. Recent SEC materials describe wrapped tokenized securities as digital representations of underlying assets, with transfer, recordkeeping, and control questions handled through existing securities law infrastructure. In practice, the token can move instantly, while the legal wrapper makes that movement count as a real ownership transfer.
Going forward, the winning crypto platforms are likely to treat NFTs as one format inside a broader asset stack. Kraken has already shifted from running an NFT marketplace to building tokenized equities and other exchange based products, which suggests the long term opportunity is not NFT storefronts by themselves, but using tokenized ownership rails across many asset classes.