NFT technology, says Harrison, provides a way to attach a price to digital art, taking advantage of that primary instinct of high-quality hoarding — the search for Veblen goods that offer the state, coveted only to the extent that they are expensive — behind many collectors. ‘urgency. Mix it up with a sparkling community eager to swap and meme any shiny new construction adjacent to blockchain at considerable prices and the trick is done.
“In this digital world, we have accelerators: all of a sudden you could get three or four times what you paid for something; tomorrow there’s someone ready to buy it,” Harrison says. Even better, blockchains can also track in a secure and unchanging way how it originated and change the hands of a witness over time. “Provenance is obviously an important part of the value of art,” Harrison says.
The people who buy NFT related art is varied. Some of its members are cryptocurrency moguls looking for the newest one to dip their savings into. “People who had cryptography in the beginning and have a lot of ether [Ethereum’s cryptocurrency], are looking for ways to use it, ”says James Beck, communications and content director at ConsenSys, a blockchain company that has created an application to store and manage NFT. They want to prove, Beck says, that they are “patterns of art on the Internet.”
It helps that some NFT markets allow users to display their purchases as in an online gallery or museum. Jamie Burke, founder and CEO of blockchain investment firm Outlier Ventures and an NFT enthusiast, is one of those interested in his new role as a supporter of the digital arts. Burke says it was initially shut down by the first “self-referential” works of art focused on cryptocurrencies, full of Bitcoin signs and pixelated memes. But when he became more interested in the space, in the summer of 2020, the new artists left him “impressed”.
“I’m going to buy art for myself and I liked the idea that I could have a unique digital edition of it,” he says. “I just started collecting personally and trying to get new artists and professionals to come to the space. I’m building a little collection. ” That doesn’t mean he rejects a lot when he shows up. On February 13, he sold an NFT for which he had paid $ 500, for $ 20,000 in ether. Advertiser the sale in a tweet, Burke said he would use the return to buy more art.
Harrison says that while right now the market is crawling with speculators who would buy and invest in any blockchain-based asset in hopes of increasing its value, bona fide collectors are getting more and more involved. “It’s a combination of people who are just speculative and people who want to collect and have something fun,” he says. “My role is to balance an element of speculation with enough people who want to buy something because they like it and want a hot picking habit. If everyone buys to speculate, it doesn’t work, then it becomes another marketable testimony. “
Some digital artists are welcome to the trend. Most platforms are easy to use, allowing them to upload their artwork, do NFT automatically and wait for bids to rain, and are often in excess of the amounts they would receive if they tried to sell their digital artwork. online or as prints. Brendan Dawes, a British graphic designer and artist who creates digital images using machine learning and algorithms, says a print of one of his pieces would normally sell for $ 2,000, while his latest NFT sold for $ 37,000. dollars.
The benefits don’t stop there. NFTs can be designed to pay their creators a cryptocurrency fee every time they change hands. If a buyer of one of Dawes’s pieces resells it, Dawes automatically receives 10 percent of the price paid. “This is again one of the differences compared to the traditional world. You will get this royalty in progress ”.