The NFT space is so early in its development that the use cases are still being figured out. I think the fundamental concept to understand is that holding the

The NFT space is so early in its development that the use cases are still being figured out. I think the fundamental concept to understand is that holding the NFT proves your ownership of the associated asset. This in turn opens up interesting down stream use cases- fractional asset ownership, creates liquidity and price discovery mechanisms in things that were previously hard to price, etc. If you want to play around without worrying about fees, there are 2 approaches- you can develop on the Ethereum test net, this is obviously free. You can also try out Solana which has extremely low fees and very fast processing times, this would be a separate blockchain but the NFT concepts would be the same (I'm not going into the argument which one is more decentralized, that doesn't really matter to you since you just want to try things out).