The NFT craze has been derided by many as nothing more than “JPEGs.”

But NFTs are going to be big and important as I’ve written about before and on many other occasions.

One area, however, that hasn’t received any attention from me (or others for that matter) is smart contracts.

Today, on Ethereum and other EVM chains, you deploy a smart contract to the network in order to make your application run.

However, if someone else wants to reuse that smart contract, they need to redeploy it (and pay the gas fees associated with it) to support a new application. They can’t simply reuse the same functionality.

This creates an inefficient network as there are multiple copies of the same piece of code all over the place, increasing congestion which raises prices as well as increasing the size of the storage required for the network, so-called “blockchain bloat.”

What’s worse is that the developers who write the smart contract for the first time get no downstream benefit from the use of their code by others. It’s open source and it’s free. Great for coder #2, but not as great for coder #1.

What if, however, there were a way for coders to get rewarded for the smart contracts they developed by others who subsequently use their code?

And what if, instead of having a piece of code redeployed hundreds, if not thousands of times to the networks, a future developer could merely say “hey, use that proven piece of code over there and I’m happy to pay the .01 cent per transaction as an ‘open source licensing fee’ because I know it works.”

That’s the super cool thing about developer royalties, which is an innovation that Radix is bringing to market in the next major release of the network, Babylon.

After that release, developers who innovate and then allow their code to get “battle-tested” are not only going to build great dApps, but they are going to generate income streams as a result.

But, wait, as they say, there’s more.

Since these smart contracts are essentially NFTs, they can be fractionalized, which means that a developer could sell off ownership stakes in a smart contract to investors, providing short-term income in return for equity. They won’t have to and we have no idea how to value a smart contract NFT (since, in theory, it could be copied/redeployed), but it’s intriguing.

There are 27 million developers in the world. They are the new kingmakers and will, in many cases, become some of the wealthiest people on the planet because of the dapps they create.

Smart contract NFTs, powered uniquely by Radix, is going to be one of the ways that happens.

P.S. the team didn’t like “DeFi-as-a-service.” Back to the drawing board.