Published In
Journal of the British Blockchain Association
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-1-2024
Subjects
Blockchains (Databases)
Abstract
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are goals associated with the most significant global issues, which include climate, health, security, and poverty. The goals are part of an agenda for making progress on environmental, social, and economic issues while ensuring peace and leaving no one behind. Meeting these goals requires effort and innovation on all fronts, including technology. Information and communication technologies have long contributed to these efforts, and more recently, blockchain for good projects have begun to bear fruit. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are, in essence, certificates of ownership stored on a blockchain, can also contribute to sustainable development. However, to this point, they have been underutilised. NFTs have inherent capabilities that can make them ideally suited to contribute towards the SDGs. Their unique capacity to validate ownership, identity, claims, and history of events makes them valuable for a variety of purposes. To date, NFTs have been employed primarily for trading digital assets such as collectibles, in-game items, digital art, and event tickets. However, their affordances—the actionable properties NFTs offer to users—make them suitable for use in ways that can significantly affect the health and well-being of humans and the planet. This article provides a framework for linking NFT affordances with the SDGs and examples of how NFT use cases are addressing, or could address, these urgent global needs.
Rights
Copyright (c) 2025 The Authors Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Locate the Document
DOI
10.31585/jbba-7-2-(6)2024
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43255
Publisher
The British Blockchain Association
Citation Details
Yuthas, K. (2024). NFTs at the Nexus of Innovation and Sustainability: A Framework Aligning NFT Affordances with the Sustainable Development Goals. The Journal of The British Blockchain Association, 7(2), 1–12.
