If you think that tokenizing phone numbers is just another stupid scatterbrained idea cooked up by scamming blockchain people to give pretend meaning to cryptocurrency, consider that phone numbers are already fully digital assets that can be bought and sold online. As in if you wanted a cool phone number like 212-222-2222, you can already shop for it on a regular e-commerce website and do an online checkout in a shopping cart. At that point, what’s the difference?
BuT wHy DoEs It NeEd tO bE oNcHaIn?
Good question. The problem is that the current user experience of buying and selling phone numbers online is clunky. I know that I can buy a phone number on a site like 212areacode.com and pay for it with a credit card or PayPal but I don’t really know how I would sell the phone number later. Do I contact them to try and sell it? Like what do I do? I don’t know. Sounds annoying and hard. And how can I place an unsolicited offer on a phone number that I really want that an existing owner has no idea is even in demand? These inefficient processes would actually be improved upon if they were onchain. Besides, there is nothing that says that an owner has to keep their phone number onchain once it’s in their possession. If one is worried about their private key being compromised, there is no reason why users wouldn’t have an option to off-ramp their asset with the option to on-ramp it back onchain later if they wanted to transfer ownership or list it for sale. Indeed, such an ability would be possible with 3DNS and their ability to tokenize another kind of digital asset, domain names. In their case, users will be able to move their domains offchain if they wish, something that could be achieved just by changing the registrar the domain is held at.
Furthermore, phone numbers as digital assets are nothing to balk at. Memorable combinations with the famed 212 NYC area code are currently listed for as high as $35,000, which is in the neighborhood of a floor Bored Ape.
Personally, if a business owner wanted to put up collateral for a $10,000 loan, I’d rather it be a super attractive phone number than a link to a picture of a cartoon. I don’t care how liquid Bored Apes are, but that’s just me.