Spoiler: it looks terrific! But despite its visual value, the NFT world has its ups and downs. There was hype when the digital artist, known as Beeple, sold his work at Christie’s for $69 million, and now we are experiencing a period of a crypto market downturn. That is the circle of life. Thus, soon we all expect a new blooming phase of the NFTs. So let’s get started and deep our toes in NFT art and its impact due to NFT licensing.
NFT stands for a non-fungible token. This means that it’s not like dollars or Bitcoin, Ethereum, Near, and other cryptocurrencies, which are fungible. On the contrary, NFT has a unique price set by the highest bidder, just like a Monet or Dalí. If you’re a digital artist, you have to sign up with a platform like NFT Art Marketplace V-ART or OpenSea, and mint digital tokens on a blockchain, and get ready to sell your artworks.
One more crucial thing, NFTs give you the ownership of the work. Compared to traditional art: you can buy a Picasso print, but only one person owns the original.
Any digital art and, basically, even physical art could be turned into NFT. For example, the project “Fingerprint” by Mykyta Zigura is installed in the sculpture park in Kyiv. A smaller version of the stainless steel sculpture is on display at the exhibition of contemporary art at the Ukrainian pavilion at Expo 2020 in Dubai, and it also has the NFT version fo sale.
Or famous Bored Ape Yacht Club, one of the most successful NFT projects — apes with unique selling for millions of dollars.
Economically, it is already legitimized. The online art market reached an estimated new high of $6 billion. According to the Art Basel report in 2019, online sales increased to 11%. This number has definitely changed since the pandemic of COVID-19. The new reality we all live in changes how the artists create their works and how we perceive the art.
Since the Metaverse is our nearest future, it makes sense to invest in virtual stuff. Based on a survey, 93% of millennial High Net Worth (HNW) collectors reported that they had bought works of art or objects from an online platform. It showed that the millennials were considerably more active buyers than other generations.
Do you remember the times of Pokémon cards? People collected and traded them like crazy. Cards exist physically, so it’s easier to understand why they’re worth money. It is much harder to answer the question of why digital art, or any other digital things, has value. By buying NFT art, you are paying not just for pixels, but also for what is beyond that — digital artists’ hours and talent they spend on creating a new type of art.
True. Creating NFTs requires a massive amount of computing energy, and many of the server farms it happens are powered by fossil fuels. It has a huge environmental impact. Fortunately, there is an alternative climate-minded blockchain — NEAR Protocol. It currently generates a carbon footprint of 174 tons of CO2 per year.
Therefore, NEAR Protocol is more than 200,000 times more carbon efficient than Bitcoin. Minting on NEAR is “healthier” for nature. So if it is important (sure, it is) for an artist or a buyer, they instead should choose NFT platforms like Digital Art Marketplace V-Art.
NFT art managed to incorporate both traditional and digital artists, making it possible to sell their artworks securely. And as long as artists can create digital art and big auction houses such as Christie’s will “accept” NFTs, it will slowly change people’s minds and perceptions of crypto art. Once upon a time, we didn’t understand what the Internet was, and now we live as digital natives and talking about Metaverse. The future is now.
