image description

Boyart's Graffiti

Boyart referred to the rebels who overthrew King Charles X in France in the 19th century as "yellow vest demonstrators." Some people think he is fighting for justice, while others think he is just stirring people's emotions. French authorities didn't like the work, so they quickly sprayed the graffiti with gray paint, as if the graffiti had never existed.

Boyart said:

image description

Contemplations of the Red Jester

Pascal Boyart

Boyart isn't the only artist making money from NFTs, now there are sky-high NFTs being sold every day, such as the 10-second video created by the famous crypto artist Beeple(Click to review), sold for a whopping $6.6 million, and he also became the first artist to auction a digital artwork at Christie's.

image description

Homer Pepe sells for $320,000

NFTs are no longer the niche market they once were. According to the NonFungible report, the NFT transaction volume in 2020 will exceed 250 million US dollars, and from the beginning of 2021 to the present, the popularity of NFT has reached a new level compared to 2020.

In addition, this data does not include NBA Top Shot’s turnover of nearly 230 million U.S. dollars. Now NBA Top Shot has nearly 200,000 people queuing up to buy every time it releases a card pack. This can be called an “astronomical figure” in the past. up.

An NFT recording a dunk by LeBron James sold for $208,000. Mark Cuban is also throwing himself into the NFT field, and everything is moving at lightning speed. Less than two months ago, Cuban just announced that he began to explore the NFT field, and now, he said in an interview with "USA Today" that he believes that NFT will become the NBA's three major players in the next ten years. One of the sources of income.

NFTs can be art, NFTs can be music, NFTs can be collectibles, real estate, sports, games, and more. Maybe this article will be turned into an NFT too, maybe a wedding will be minted as an NFT too.

Recently, I even heard some very "philosophical" discussions about NFT in Clubhouse: Can NFT be cast as NFT?

This can't help but make people think about some questions: What created the enthusiasm for NFT? Why is the NFT boom only now? Is this just common hype in the crypto space? Is it a bubble destined to burst or can it really create more value for creators or collectors?

secondary title

Why is the NFT craze starting now?

Let's start with some basics. NFTs are easy to visualize. They are very concrete, such as a piece of art, a song or even digital real estate in the game universe like Decentraland. These are things that can be easily grasped by people who do not understand the encryption field. An important reason for its great appeal.

The most difficult part of explaining what NFT is may be its name itself. Its abbreviation (NFT) and full name (Non Fungible Token) sound very obscure. But in fact, you only need to explain to people that NFT is actually some digital assets that cannot be copied or imitated, and people will understand what it is.

Much of cryptography is abstract and complex, requiring an understanding of technology, programming, and economic theory. You can try to explain to your grandparents what "liquidity mining" is and see if they understand. But NFT is different. Open the door of NFT and you will find a very interesting world, which attracts a lot of fresh blood.

Mason Nystrom, an analyst at Messari who studies NFTs, said:

Nystrom estimates that the total number of DeFi users is around 1 million to 2 million. Although this is not a small number, it is nothing compared to the NBA's 42.7 million fans on Facebook. Many of those 42.7 million people are going to be curious about the NBA Top Shot, or, as Zack Seward puts it: it's attracting interest from people outside the typical crypto circles.

And why did the explosion of NFT happen until now? Why not in 2017 or 2018 when NFT was born? There are five simple reasons:

In addition, there may be deeper reasons driving the development of NFT. "I think everyone should pay attention to the macro trends that are taking shape in human society." WhaleShark, a famous NFT collector, said that he claims to be the second largest collector in the world, with a collection of nearly 210,000 NFTs.

"More and more people are spending a lot of time swiping their phones and surfing the Internet, and the way we live is shifting from physical to digital." WhaleShark said. Most of us stare at two, three or even four screens every day, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

WhaleShark said that when we want to own something, we are more and more fond of watching photos, videos, etc. of this thing in front of the screen, which is natural. Living in the digital world is more and more like our real life, or it is life.

secondary title

NFT: Reshaping Ownership

For a long time, the potential of blockchain technology to "reshape ownership" sounded like bragging, but NFT is making it a reality. Take Eve Sussman, for example, a well-known media-rich artist (film, sculpture, photography) whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian.

In 2004, she created a 12-minute video for the Whitney Biennial, "89 Seconds of Alcazár," re-enacting scenes from Diego Velásquez's 1656 classic, "Las Meninas." Critics have raved about it. New York Magazine called it a "masterpiece."

Sussman's video got a second life in the NFT space. She works with a company called Snark.Art, a blockchain-savvy agency that works with artists to create innovative art forms, such as sculpting video into a 2,304-piece grid. Collectors can purchase a tiny fragment as an NFT. Each of these "atoms" is only 20 by 20 pixels and can be viewed as a small movie. They called this new form "89-second atomization."

It's similar to the way Boyart divides his street art into 100 pieces. But Sussman didn't stop with piecemeal ownership and went a step further. If you buy one of the Sussman 2304 atoms, you can only see a microscopic part of the work, which requires other atoms to fit together to make sense.

In the blockchain space, thanks to the smart contract (the code in the NFT that determines ownership), you can "borrow" their NFT from all other NFT owners of "89 seconds atomization", when they borrow all their pixels When it is given to you, you will be able to admire the complete work.

Very expensive art is completely out of reach for most people. But if you break it down into pieces and sell each piece for $100, you're giving less wealthy collectors a chance to be part of the community and own a real Famous works of art, but also become an active participant.

More information about NFT fragmentation can be found at:

Opinion丨How can NFT fragmentation improve social tokens?

NFTs can take many forms. Sometimes, they're just a digital version of a physical item, but that's an improvement. They will empower physical assets with greater innovation. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in art, such as Boyart's graffiti. Ordinary paintings are static, but in NFT, artists can use animation, audio, and AR to inject more vitality into the image.

Admittedly, tricks like this have long been possible in digital art, but that doesn't undermine the issue of digital scarcity. NFT solves this problem, and smart contracts also allow artists to program future changes to their works. For example, Boyart is now making an NFT whose layers change over time. NFT art can be programmed to display different images triggered by real-world events, like the weather, or Christmas morning, or who won the election.

NFTs are attracting artists from traditional fields outside the blockchain world. Take Elizabeth Meggs, for example, an oil painting artist from Brooklyn, New York, who has Zoom calls with other artists in the studio every week, and they talk more and more about NFTs.

As Marion Maneker said in an interview with ArtNews: "The first unspoken rule of talking about art on Clubhouse is that all topics will eventually turn to the obsession with NFT."

Meggs is excited about making her own NFTs and how inventive they are, especially as they also make the art world more inclusive of women and people of color. She points out that 87 percent of the collections of major American museums come from men, and 85 percent come from white men. And NFT can make it fairer, it can establish a direct connection between the creator and the collector, thereby eliminating the prejudice that has never disappeared in the long history.

Meggs said:

secondary title

Subversion of traditional fields

Another feature of NFT is to incentivize artists: the ability to collect royalties.

This is completely non-existent in the field of traditional art. Let's say you're a very young artist and you sell one of your paintings for $1,000. But you feel it's worth the higher price. When you become famous many years later, for example, thirty years later, the painting sells for $30 million, how much royalties will you get? In traditional art, you don't get a penny. (The actual situation in each country will be different. For example, there is an artist's resale right, which can provide resale fees for the artist or his heirs)

And NFT is different, royalties can be programmed into works through smart contracts, so every time your painting is sold, you can earn a part of the income, and it is permanent. For example, when Boyart's "Contemplations of the Red Jester" is resold at a price of 75ETH, he can also get a 5% royalty income.

The same concept applies to music as well. For example, Canadian rapper and producer Vandal released a song called "Rap Crypto" in 2017.

When Vandal first heard about CryptoKitties, he wasn't interested at all: "What the hell is this? Why are you collecting cats?"

But afterwards, he saw greater potential for NFT. He started exploring NFT music, became fascinated by DAO, and soon after founded DAO Records, which has signed 100 musicians and released about 50 music NFTs. (Vandal said that he is not the first musician to make music NFT, and he believes that Connie Digital is the "OG" of music NFT)

For Vandal, music NFTs are more than just a hype gimmick, a fad, or a trendy way to make money.

NFT breaks the current music industry model. The problem dates back to the days of Napster, before Apple got in and charged 99 cents per MP3. But who gave them the right to price their music? This devalues ​​the music quite a bit.

Streamers like Spotify or YouTube haven't fared much better either, as they pay artists so little and take most of the revenue themselves. And there's no way for artists to interact with fans.

Vandal says:

In this way, it is understandable that artists like Kings of Leon have also developed a strong interest in NFT, and they have also released an album in the form of NFT. Artists can bundle NFTs with real-world perks. For example, the NFT released by Kings of Leon includes a "golden ticket", the holder can sit in the front row of each tour of the band, and this benefit is lifelong.

Kings of Leon is not the only person (or organization) working on NFT ticketing. Mintbase co-founder Carolin Wend believes that ticket-based NFTs could allow organizers of events such as music festivals to easily distribute revenue with partners.

Suppose you are the promoter of a music festival, and for every ticket sold, you can distribute 5% to the DJ, 5% to the reggae band, 10% to the venue provider, and so on. Payments will be instant, transparent, and all confirmed and verified on the blockchain. It enables those working in the creative economy to earn a fair income.

secondary title

NFT first experience

One reason the market is thriving is that it is now easy to mint your own NFTs. Today, anyone can take a photo of their own plant, mint it into an NFT, and immediately put it up for sale.

So I decided to give it a try.

I just recently moved to Denver, and I don't have a lot of pictures to hang on my walls. So I took a few pictures I liked that I had taken while traveling and framed it, I chose a picture of a glacier in Iceland and hung it on my biggest wall.

Maybe I can sell this image as an NFT? If I think it has some value in real life, maybe other people feel the same way.

So I created an account on OpenSea, the whole process was very simple and fast, when I set the auction start price, it told me that the lowest price was 0.4ETH, which was $540 at the time, which was ridiculously high.

Before listing my pricing, there is one small hurdle. I need to pay a one-time gas fee to OpenSea, after which all my sales setups will no longer need to pay gas fees. At the time, the cost was $91. Skyrocketing gas fees are a common problem in this space, which is one of the reasons why some NFT platforms use different blockchains (for example, NBA Top Shot uses the Flow chain).

The average person would never spend $50 to mint an NFT, which is why Mintbase switched to the NEAR chain. I believe Ethereum is a great testing ground for many, but it is not the future, it is just too expensive and bloated.

Posting my photos suddenly became an expensive thing to do, but I paid the processing fee anyway. When my new NFT was minted, I watched it appear in the new OpenSea listings stream. They are running all the time, like an industrial assembly line, and we can roughly understand how hot the NFT field is now from its fast operation.

secondary title

NFTs are status symbols

Let's turn our attention to buyers: why on earth would people pay thousands of dollars for low-res art that isn't as advanced as Pac-Man?

I thought there were only two possibilities: aesthetics or they thought it would make them money.

Then I learned a third explanation. I spoke with Jamie Burke, CEO of Outlier Ventures, a blockchain venture capital firm. Burke, who works part-time as an NFT collector, knows the community well. He established an invite-only Discord channel called "100XARt", the largest community of NFT collectors dedicated to creating an art neighborhood in Decentraland. Burke's theory is that people buy NFTs to promote a certain status in a certain community.

You can think of NFTs as a new type of social currency, and in some crypto circles, they are a kind of proof that you really belong to this community.

When Burke first saw early highly pixelated NFT art, such as CryptoPunks, he didn't like it aesthetically. He even said to himself, "This is not something I want to hang on the wall."

After he communicated with more collectors in the community, he quickly realized that NFT has little to do with the content itself. Ownership itself is what matters. Owning a CryptoPunk proves that you participated in the first NFT project, proving that you understood it before anyone else. On the surface, it's a digital badge of honor.

It reminded Burke of why people bought albums back then. Of course, maybe part of the reason you buy an album is that you love the songs on it, but also think of it as a beloved work of art. And that artwork boosts your status among your record lover community.

Burke said:

So while NFTs may be a radical new technology, in a sense they're digging into something primitive and ancient, into "true human desires."

Or, splashing out on NFTs is a way to show off how big of a crypto fortune you have. You can go to Twitter and ask GMoney why they paid 140 ETH (about $150,000 at the time) for a 24 X 24 pixel CryptoPunk that looks like a 1983 Atari game image.

As GMoney explained on Twitter, after spending a lot of time learning about the crypto community, he realized that being a CryptoPunk owner was akin to being part of an exclusive club. Then, he immediately paid for it.

GMoney says:

GMoney bought his digital “Rolexes,” but unlike real-life Rolex watches, which may be cheap knockoffs, the authenticity of his CryptoPunk can be verified on the blockchain. But having said that, it is almost a certainty that Rolex will retain its value after ten years. But for CryptoPunks, no one is sure of that yet.

But even if the speculative bubble bursts, NFTs offer artists like Boyart and collectors like Burke something more valuable, albeit subjective. They can be ways of creating, of playing, of communicating, of organizing, of being aesthetic.

Burke said:

There are also many people who will complain that most of these NFTs, such as pixelated frogs, MEMEs, satires on encryption technology, etc., are not "art" at all.

But as NFT supporters often say: "People's respect for Andy Warhol (Andy Warhol is one of the most famous figures in the art world of the 20th century, an advocate and leader of Pop Art, he The same opinion has been expressed in works that boldly experiment with various reproduction techniques such as letterpress printing, rubber or wood rubbing, gold leaf technology, and photo projection".