NFTs Big Picture 🔮

Monday, March 22nd 2021

Mar 22, 2021

Hey! Sorry there was no email last week, honestly I was absolutely up the walls shooting a project till all hours all weekend, but we’re back and hopefully you’ll see the results of said project very soon too 👀

kflore$🧸 @kfloressx

don’t ask me if i wanna go out this summer just pick me up

Anyway,C’mere to me…

little bits

Expense your lunch `🍔🍟`

A Toronto restaurant chain, Good Fortune Burger, renamed its burgers and products on Uber Eats to officer supplies — so that they would show up on the receipts and employees could expense their lunch… genius…

Walrus Adventure Continues

The Arctic Walrus that remarkably showed up on Irish shores in Kerry last weekend has now been spotted in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Another long journey for an animal that so rarely travels this far south.

Seal rescue Ireland are confident based on its markings and tusks that it’s the very same one that first appeared in Valentia.

Interesting

NFTs Big Picture 🔮

(worth a read, promise)

Surely at this stage you’ve heard an NFT, a Non-Fungible Token, they’ve been all the news and rage for the last few months.

If your ear is close to the ground in the tech world you’re probably fed up with hearing about them, especially because technically they aren’t anything new and have been around for years.

Nevertheless, I’ve consumed a lot of media about them in recent weeks and they have massive potential, albeit certain things are very over-hyped right now.

Really briefly, let me catch others up, I’m going to spare the details here, especially the technical bits because there are a million much better resources out there.

An NFT is essentially a digital asset that is provably unique and one of a kind. Yes, you could have many copies of the digital file but you’ll only ever have one person who owns a given NFT, that certificate as such can’t be duplicated or forged and this is enabled because they utilise a blockchain.

The majority of NFTs currently use the Ethereum blockchain, but they work differently from an ETH coin.

If you’ve only heard about them recently the concept can be difficult to understand, as in they’ll initially seem silly or worthless, but trust me there more to it and the possibilities in the long-term are where it’s really at. Plus how people perceive value has always been a contentious topic, and this is a new medium for expressing that, people love scarcity and the blockchain can verify that like nothing before.

The big headline that you’ll have seen is that digital artist Beeple, real name Mike Winkelmann, sold an NFT of a digital collage for an insane $69,346,250 — making it one of the largest art sales ever, the third-largest by a living artist and naturally the biggest NFT sale ever.

A square collage of 5,000 works from Beeple, start with the oldest in the top left corner and continuing to recent works in the bottom right corner. — Everydays: The First 5000 Days, Image: Beeple, via Christie's.

This was definitely reported as a sort of overnight success, but in reality, Mike was one of the first people working on and sharing digital art and had amassed a large social media following too after years of relentless work. He had never really been able to monetise it like ‘physical art’ and started experimenting with some NFTs last October.

The $69M piece was a collage of Beeple’s first 5,000 works (an enormous feat) which he shared every day from May 1st 2007 - January 7th, 2021.

The auction started at just $100 but was at over $1 Million within the first ten minutes…

This was Beeple’s reaction.

beeple @beeple

holy fuck.

What is definitely less appealing about NFTs is that the viewing ‘experience’ of the piece is no different whether you own it or not, and in most cases, you aren’t also buying the distribution rights either.

For example, the person who paid $69M doesn’t have a version of it that is different from the jpg I have included above…

Although some of the short term hype is most definitely inflated excitement, this was a big validation moment for digital art and NFTs, a force to be reckoned with. And even the small sales are not insignificant amounts of money, with many NFTs going for several thousands of dollars.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter Co-Founder & CEO, is ‘selling’ his first tweet as an NFT, but will be donating all the proceeds to charity. This one from 2006 ⤵

jack @jack

just setting up my twttr

The current bid is at $2.5M and supposedly it’ll end very shortly (writing this very late Sunday night). Again though, they’ll just own the bragging rights really, you can still view it as is and the new owner’s experience won’t be different in that sense.

“In October, the National Basketball Association partnered with Dapper Labs to start selling clips and images of famous basketball players as NFTs. By the end of February, they had made more than $230 million. Artists also got in on it, with a copy of the famous Internet creature Nyan Cat selling for $600,000 in mid-February”
(read more - Washington Post)

Nyan Cat is being sold as a one-of-a-kind piece of crypto art - The Verge

Big picture though, many people are comparing NFTs to the very early days of the internet or social media, and I know that seems far fetched but their application spans far out of art, and they aren’t going away anytime soon (best to read up when you get a chance).

Currently, there are issues with blockchains in scalability and transaction speeds, there are also lots of barriers to entry from managing and storing keys and wallets, to paying gas fees (cost of executing a transaction on the blockchain), to all of the regulations in the centralised world that will need to be bridged.

These obstacles were the same at the dawn of the internet, there were so many issues with accessibility and bandwidth, all things that have been solved and because of which we use the internet in ways that weren’t even imagined at the beginning.

Similarly, before the eventual crash of the Dot-com bubble there was loads of hype around this new ‘internet’ thing, that so many didn’t understand, but from the ashes rose Google and Amazon and the internet we couldn’t live without.

One of the most interesting things to me, that is happening right now, is the re-sales, and this is one of the cool potentials for both artists and those early adopters. On the Etherum blockchain, you can build in self-fulfilling contracts and perpetual sales splits, say for example the artist could get 10% every time the asset re-sells, allowing them to retain a guaranteed piece of it’s growing worth and taking the pressure off the initial sale to be of a certain amount.

Beeple sold a 10-sec video NFT, back in October 2020, to art collector Pablo Rodriguez-Fraile for almost $67,000, and at the end of February 2021, Pablo re-sold that same piece for $6.6M (three weeks before the big collage sale).

There are big things happening with them in the creator economy too, people are using them as a tool for investing in creators, similar to shareholding, and this may grant them access to exclusive perks or even voting sway in the company or creator that issued them. In music too, artists are selling publishing rights via NFTs, specifically, there is a good article here - VICE

So what do you think, would you buy an NFT?