Revenge of the Artists: From Creativity to Crypto — A brief story about NFTs
The world and technology are changing fast in 2021, COVID-19 has massively accelerated the global shift to digital, compressing ten years of e-commerce adoption into three months, and with Bitcoin blasting past 50,000€ in recent days, the whole world is taking notice of cryptocurrency and of course, blockchain, the underlying technology behind it all.
Beyond the value though are the practical applications which we may not be aware of it yet, the emergence of decentralized technologies already shines a new era of possibilities specially for artists, allowing them to fully own and distribute their art.
With the support of blockchain technology, new platforms like Zora (for designers) and Audius (for musicians) are emerging, seeking to create ecosystems that instantly rewards artists for their creative expression. Witch means that as an artist or a label owner, you can get paid at the exact same time as others are listening to your music.
What Are NFTs, Anyway?
NFTs are a technology used to authenticate an artwork. Determining whether a work is art or not is up to the viewer.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens (fungible is a fancy economic word that basically means replaceable), enable digital representation of unique physical assets, with distinguishing metadata and identification codes. They serve as a certificate of authenticity, using a string of characters to prove ownership and legitimacy.
While they have been around since 2017, NFT’s exploded in popularity recently as they’ve been embraced by digital arts, music, and entertainment.
People buy NFT the same reason as they buy a piece of artwork or antique in the real world. They enjoy buying rare, adorable and valuable things.
Some people simply display to show off, while some earn from trading it. Digital art collection is similar to real object collection to some extent — you could see it as both a hobby and an investment.
NFTs allow you to monetize digital goods that can have previously been cheap or free by designate the asset as “original”. While there can be many copies of .wavs .movs .gifs and .jpegs, there will be a designated NFT version of it.
As the world shifts more towards sustainability, we may see efforts to cut down physical production and this type of digital ownership, possibly becoming a whole new billion dollar segment.
