Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, made history in March when his NFT titled “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” sold for more than $ 69 million at an auction at Christie’s.
NFTs, or non-expendable tokens, are unique digital assets, including jpegs and video clips, that are represented by code registered in the blockchain, a decentralized digital book that documents transactions. Each NFT can be bought and sold, as can the physical assets, but the blockchain allows you to track the ownership and validity of each.
On average, NFTs become extremely boisterous. Winkelmann’s NFT, a jpeg file of a digital collage with 5,000 futuristic images daily that he did every day from May 1, 2007 to January 7, 2021, made him a very rich man. (The buyer was Vignesh Sundaresan, the founder of the Metapurse NFT project.)
But there’s one key thing in buying NFT, including selling your eight-figure NFT, that most people misunderstand, according to Winkelmann on CNBC Make It.
“I think people don’t understand that when you buy, you have the testimony [or NFT]. You can show the testimonial and show yourself the owner of the symbol, but you are not the copyright owner “on the art that the witness represents,” says Winkelmann, 37.
Like “if you buy one [physical] painting, you just bought the painting, “he says.” You have not purchased the copyright for this image. And so it’s very similar to these tokens. “
The NFT “Everydays: The First 5000 Days” that Winkelmann auctioned at Christie’s, for example, was sold including a massive jpeg file and an Ethereum blockchain code, but did not include copyright ownership over it. ‘art.
In fact, on Monday, Winkelmann auctioned off one of the individual images from “Everydays” called “Ocean Front,” which he created on 4,344 in March 2019. It sold for $ 6 million at the NFT Nifty Gateway market (where the proceeds went to the Open Earth Foundation, a non-profit organization that aims to develop a better digital infrastructure for the environment).
Sundaresan, the NFT buyer at Christie’s auction, would not be entitled to sell any of the individual images. Winkelmann, on the other hand, has the right, as the copyright holder, to continue selling the images (or “shares” as they are called) of his work for profit.
“That’s what’s hard to understand about it,” Winkelmann says.
While it may seem strange or unwise to buy just one jpeg, “honestly, at the end of the day, if someone pays for it, you can sell it,” Winkelmann says.
Even without copyright ownership, Winkelmann still considers NFTs valuable, because the interests between the artist and the buyer align, he says.
“I want to see yours [NFT] they increase their value and want to see how successful I am as an artist in order to win them all. Here we form the same team “.
All in all, “I’m very, very bullish on technology and space in the long run,” Winkelmann says. “I think people need to be careful right now because there’s a rush and it’s very new. It’s pretty speculative.”
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