Appearing recently thanks to the advent of smart contracts, NFTs have carved out a significant share of the cryptocurrency market. Concretely, an NFT is a unique virtual object, everyone can see it, but its ownership belongs only to one owner. Its title is engraved in the blockchain and no one else can claim it.
The technology 🖲
All this is of course based on the cryptographic process known as blockchain. Specifically the Ethereum blockchain, with its smart contract system. The Ethereum network allows users to create, publish, sell and share NFTs. That is, anyone can create a "work" and sell it on the network through a "Market Place". I am indeed talking about a work, because the NFT being a unique object, one of its main applications in the real world is none other than art.
NFTs have entered an era of popularization to the public, just observe what is happening in the world. From the French startups NFT (Sorare), Snopp Dogg reveals on Twitter that he is a whale in NFT. It's not funny anymore.
The field of Art and Blockchain are two sectors confronted with issues of ownership, corporality, and value manipulation. On the one hand, we have traditional "physical" and "tangible" art, and on the other, digital art that is expressed in "bits" and code.
Traditional art is not divisible, it is subject to deterioration linked to the life cycle of the materials that compose it, it is subject to alteration and destruction. In addition, the art of verifying the work is complex and requires specific skills and tools. Digital art, on the other hand, is easily divisible, it is not exposed to the alterations of time, but depends on the artist or the owner, on the will to share and keep the work available.
The ability to link the identity of the work to its creative journey and to carry this history on the blockchain, allows each creative action and passage of the work to generate an NFT. Once linked and chained to the previous one, it is able to maintain the information and generate a story.
The security of the work is not entrusted to third parties, but to the historical path of individual actions, the complete representation of the work is the sum of all actions recorded on the NFT tokens that cannot be modified. With their encrypted wallet and by means of the public key (identifier) and the private key (secret), the artist validates (timestamps) the intellectual property of the work.
When the first NFT is exchanged, all movements and transactions are initiated for each sale/purchase; the chain that is created from this data represents the history of the work in terms of transactions. Whoever owns a tangible work has the ability to duplicate it or make it disappear, just as the data on a server can be modified or deleted.
The possibility offered by a structure that "tells" the entire history of the works with non-manipulable NFTs, consisting of a string whose sequence cannot be modified, conveys the entire path taken by the artist to arrive at a unique identity of the work.
SuperRare (Authentic digital art market)
One of the most successful projects is SuperRare, a kind of social network for art creators and collectors based on the blockchain.
SuperRare uses the Ethereum blockchain to create digital artworks and tokenize them so that the entire history and origin of an artwork can be tracked on a distributed ledger that no one controls and anyone can access. Once the work is created and forever linked to an NFT, it can be bought, sold and even managed as a long-term investment.
Artists can sell their work through an auction or fixed price process. Once the NFT has been sold, it can be resold at any price on other NFT trading platforms.
NFTs are designed to give collectors something that cannot be copied: ownership of the work (although the artist can still retain copyright and reproduction rights, just as with physical artworks). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.
Recently, Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold the most expensive digital artwork in history.
"Honestly, I never thought I could sell my work" - Beeple
Beeple says in an interview at his South Carolina home in October 2020. Two months later, in December 2020, his portfolio reached $69.3 million, selling digital art encrypted by an NFT.
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