NFTs and Web3 are in many ways intertwined. Most people associate NFT with art represented by a digital token and as an investment asset. But with Web3, NFTs are not just representing digital art. They could replace traditionally less secure medical records, providing more data privacy and be utilized in other areas of science.
Use cases of NFT in science
SECURE STORAGE AND TRANSFER OF INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY AND PATENTS
Since the ownership of NFT tokens is only proved through the timestamps and the entire history of the IP, the same applies to patents and intellectual properties minted into NFTs. NFTs can be used to protect and certify the ownership of particular scientific research or scientific patents. NFTs could also provide the necessary data for verification, this creates a public ledger that documents all transactions related to patents.
NFTs are undoubtedly playing a big role in the future of metaverse and web3 because it’s through NFTs that scientific research can be securely transferred. For instance, The University of California Berkeley, auctioned The Fourth Pillar NFT pegged to documents relating to the Nobel-prizewinning immunotherapy cancer research of James Allison for more than $50,000. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, for starters partnered with Sotheby’s to auction an NFT which featured the source code of the original web browser. Also, Biology pioneer George Church’s company, Nebula Genomics, has planned to sell an NFT of Church’s genome. Church is a geneticist at Harvard University in Cambridge well known for his controversial proposals, one which is resurrecting the wooly mammoth and creating a dating app based on DNA. He helped launch the Human Genome Project.
IMPROVES THE HEALTHCARE IN TERMS OF ADMINISTRATION.
NFTs are now instrumental in the healthcare system. Blood donation bodies have encouraged the use of NFTs. Blood donors are marked with a particular token which can be followed through the system. This donation can then be tracked from transportation to the hospital, to the blood bank and even its final recipient. With NFTs, blood can be registered into a digital blood bank where the need for a particular blood type can be tracked via the blockchain system and it will be delivered to where it’s needed.
NFTs are also useful in the pharmaceutical industry as it is used to indicate a particular batch of the drug. This makes it easier to track and authenticate a drug and any irregularities can be tracked and the problem fixed easily. Also it makes the tracking and retraction of a drug from the market easier as the particular drug would be marked on the NFT.
NFTs play a major role in documentation of health data in healthcare. Patients today know that their data exists but they have no access to it nor do they know where it goes. The use of NFT would enable patients to have access to their data and know when it’s been used. This is because an NFT would mark the data as a form of identification as it belongs to a particular person and even provide a form of income to the owner when the patient’s data is being used by researchers. NFT ledgers also provide safer methods of storing sensitive medical data while still allowing authorized healthcare providers access when required.
These two are the major use cases of NFTs in the world of science for now. But as time goes on, other use cases in this same domain will definitely pop up as we all know that the crypto space is filled with endless opportunities.
