Non Fungible Tokens will revolutionize Art
#1 of my Tech Predictions for 2022
A new way of securing ownership and authenticity of digital goods has exploded during 2021 and will continue to revolutionize the Art world with strong in-roads to owning digital stuff in the metaverse.
When the artist known as Beeple sold a digital piece of art, called: “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS” on Christie´s in March 2021 for $ 69 million, it marked a few industry firsts: This was the first unique piece of digital art sold from the auction house, and the first time that cryptocurrency was accepted as payment.
It also meant that the talks around Nun Fungible Tokens or NFT´s exploded. Because this allows for the authentication of the piece of art and the verification of ownership to be stored in a Blockchain that can´t be tampered with.
And that is quite necessary when we talk about the-original ownership of any piece of digital content. Being digital means that indistinguishable copies of the original can be made with a simple right click. So, we need a mechanism to able to prove the provenance of the piece. And that´s where NFT´s come into the picture.
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What is an NFT?
An NFT is a collectible digital asset. Like any physical collectible, NFT technology allows digital collectibles to be provably unique, authentic, and ownable, giving them inherent value in the eyes of collectors.
In the case of digital art, an NFT is a digital token that is inextricably tied to the artwork using blockchain technology and includes important details regarding the provenance and authenticity of the artwork in a way that is unforgeable.
To learn more about the topic, I signed up for the online digital art website called Nifty Gateway . This is a centralized marketplace for buying and selling NFT´s (they call them Nifties). Here I learned that the art pieces can be sold in lots of different ways: either as one single piece or as a numbered series where you often must win a lottery to be the lucky buyer. A piece can be auctioned, or an artist can decide to sell the artwork for a minute to how many who wants to buy it. If you don´t get the piece of art when it´s launched for sale (called a drop) you can buy it on the secondary market. And every time a piece is resold the artist gets a cut.
I now own two different art pieces. One of them is called Reborn by an artist called VEXX. He opened for the sale of the piece in two minutes and sold 245 at $333 — I got #172. That´s $ 81.000 of revenue — not bad when you´re a quite unknown 22 years old guy from Belgium!
Some experts call the whole NFT movement the biggest scam ever , but Reborn has already been resold 187 times on the secondary market for both less and more than the original price. Right now, my art piece, bought in April, is being sold for $1150, so not the worst investment so far.
OpenSea — the largest peer-to-peer marketplace for crypto goods — saw its transaction volume jump to $3.4 billion in August alone this year, so a lot of activity is taking place
NFT´s for all kinds of digital goods
To get the NFT movement we need to understand that NFT´s are being created for all kinds of digital content.
How would you feel about owning the original Charlie Bit My Finger Video — one of the first viral videos watched more than 880 million times on Youtube. The family took it down and sold it as an NFT for $760.000!
Or what about owning the original source code for the World Wide Web written by its inventor Tim Berners-Lee. He put it up for sales as an NFT on Sotheby and got $5.4 million
Or what about owning a video file of a LeBron James Basketball dunk? 59 copies were sold — the highest price was $210.000 …
And in that sense, NFTs are just like baseball cards and autographed merchandise. They are rare, tradeable, and collectible. So, of course, the sports memorabilia industry also got involved in the NFT market.
Limited Editions
Brands and companies around the world have started to integrate NFT verification into their business. LVMH, Prada, and Cartier have partnered up to create Aura — their own bespoke blockchain for tokenization and verification of ownership over real-world luxury goods.
Nike has started minting NFT´s to go with every pair of limited-edition sneakers sold. So when you buy a physical pair of sneaks, you’ll also get a digital NFT version that is portable to any virtual space and proves that you are the owner (read more about this in the chapter about Metaverses).
It is still the very early days of NFT´s
Whether the NFT movement is a bubble, a scam, a necessity for the verification of goods in the upcoming Metaverse, or a revolution to the Art market remains to be seen (and probably it´s a bit of everything). But one thing is for certain: the NFT movement will gain a lot of speed in 2022 and it will branch out in a lot of unthinkable directions. As with all new technologies you need to tread lightly if you want to be involved.
I predict that Non Fungible Tokens will continue to grow as a technology in 2022 to become a much more mainstream way of securing your ownership of your items.
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