NFTs in tokengated/NFT-gated commerce are used as tickets. They are used to grant access. This can be anywhere, and can be on the internet or the physical world.

Access control is done by verifying NFT ownership, which requires validating ownership of the cryptocurrency wallet. This, by way of how cryptocurrencies are designed, also shares the entire contents of the wallet.

In other words, as a customer you don’t just use the NFT as a ticket, but also share your entire financial history with the entity doing the access control.

Point 1: Tracking

NFT-gated commerce is great for companies, because all that extra information is excellent for building customer profiles and targeting advertisements. For customers, however, it is terrible. It eradicates all privacy.

It makes sense for companies in the commerce sector to jump on NFTs to track customers, as tracking on the internet (e.g. with cookies) has become continuously harder.

Point 2: Capitalizing on FOMO

The scarcity aspect of NFTs encourages customers to make rash decisions (“this item is scarce and time is running out”). This is directly capitalizing on FOMO.

The time pressure acts as a counterweight to common sense, and will make customers more willing to pay the price of privacy/anonymity.

Point 3: Tailored service

As mentioned earlier, the wallet and all its transactions is known to entity that was accessed with the NFT. Therefore, this entity can decide to use all the information in the customer’s wallet to provide a different level of service.

Frequent customer? Your prices go down. You’ve shopped at a competitor? Your prices go up. You’re not a loyal customers? You’ll get sold the lower-quality goods (and nobody will tell you).

Counterarguments (all invalid)

There are no valid counterarguments.

• Using multiple wallets for anonymity would require a gargantuan effort, and might not even be possible at all.

• Using privacy-focused coins such as Monero is unrealistic, as cryptocurrency exchanges and companies are unlikely to be willing to accept them, as they have a too-high risk associated with them, in particularly the risk of being used for illegal purposes.

• Using cryptocurrency tumblers has the same problem. While it’s possible to use them to anonymize transactions, any wallet associated with tumblers is going to be treated as high-risk by cryptocurrency exchanges and companies.

• The people that get an NFT and thus manage to make it in, form an in-group that is purely based on financial interests. There is no community because some people are left out (because NFTs are artificially scarce), and some people that made it in are also not