HFS Research publications are now Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)

The Situation: The research and analyst industry has long been plagued by ownership and citation issues. The readers pick up exciting data points that analysts spend months researching and share with the world as their own. Attribution to the research house is conveniently forgotten or casually ignored.

This is especially true for premium HFS Research reports such as our Top 10 reports available exclusively for our paid clients. Given the high quality of research and world-class insights, we’ve uncovered horse-trading, underhand dealings, and hawala transactions for our reports by service providers, enterprises, and investors trying to get smarter on the latest trends and appear smarter in front of their bosses. Sharing these reports without acquiring licensing rights is now, unfortunately, commonplace. The greed for getting a few more likes on Linked In or retweets has taken this behavior to never seen levels.

Quoting our research leader, Joel Martin, the lead author for just-released SaaS XXV reports based on painstaking 1,000 interviews, “Company X was quoting my research to me yesterday. But we never sold the report license to them, did we?”

Well, we’ve had enough! Starting today, we are converting all our research deliverables to NFTs. We genuinely believe that writing research reports is an art form, our analysts are artists, and our IP should be protected. For god sake, if cryptokitties deserve to be NFTs, so does our research.

If you are a genuine HFS subscriber, you can only buy our research as NFTs. By using blockchain technology, these tokens can be used to verify the authenticity and digital ownership of the report. We will even allow clients to buy just the killer pages or data charts, especially if you are the one who does not bother to read the entire report but jumps straight to the rankings chart!

Keep in mind that the owners of HFS Research NFTs are not granted the copyright or intellectual property rights to the underlying asset. Therefore, when an NFT is traded, the buyer will not receive copyright privileges. They always remain with HFS, but you have genuine proof of the research report ownership.

This was not an easy decision for us, and we had some vehement internal opposition. Josh Matthews, our practice leader for sustainability, raised some critical questions “do you even know the associated carbon footprint that we will leave with this decision?” That’s precisely why we’ve decided to mint our NFTs using Polygon – the Proof of Stake (PoS) based eco-friendly avatar of the Ethereum blockchain.

Also, note that we are not making any changes to our freemium model – our blogs, highlights, and POVs are still available for free. We believe in sharing research, but we expect to receive the credit for doing the research.

The Bottom Line: The next time you see someone posting some research like their own, ask for the proof before you “like” the post! And if you are an HFS Subscriber or want to be one and have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with sales@hfsresearch.com. We sincerely hope and pray that you will take pride in owning your genuine copy of HFS Research.

And just in case you don’t know what NFTs are, here is the definition: A non-fungible token (NFT) is a non-interchangeable unit of data stored on a blockchain, a form of digital ledger, that can be sold and traded. (Source: Wikipedia)

Update (April 3, 2022): By the way, this was an April Fools joke!