![]() The starting bid for his work, a virtual collage of pictures from his life taken over 5,000 consecutive days, was $100 and has since surpassed $1 million.Īnother major player: NBA Top Shot, a site launched last October for virtual, video-based basketball trading cards. Next week, Christie’s will finish a 14-day, online sale of a piece by the digital artist Beeple. The sales at Christie’s are doing the same, the venerable auction house bestowing a sense of legitimacy to the genre. Mainstream celebrities like Paul are latching on to the trend, pushing it into the spotlight. 2021 Why are NFTs in the news right now?Ī combination of factors. “It appeals to people who have built up their own audiences-maybe on social media-to go and sell work directly to their audience.”Ī collage by Beeple for sale at Christie’s the artist has also collaborated with brands like Nike and Louis Vuitton. He sold an NFT through Christie’s four months ago for $131,250, nearly ten times the estimated price. “NFTs are the single biggest reorientation of power and control back into the hands of the artist basically since the Renaissance and the printing press,” says Robert Alice, a London-based artist. For example, YouTube star Logan Paul sold $5 million worth of his own NFT-a cartoon image of himself styled as a Pokémon trainer-last weekend. The ability to set up a recurring revenue stream appeals to any famous person looking to extend their fame’s earning potential. NFTs can be coded to allow the original creator to collect money each time the token trades hands, usually for between 2.5% to 10% of the sale price. Artists in particular have historically struggled to reap rewards if their work appreciates in value. The internet makes it easy to duplicate and forge something, and without an indisputable ownership record such as an NFT, the good is essentially worthless.įor a seller, NFTs make it not only possible to sell something today, but also to keep earning tomorrow. Today more than 260 of the characters trade hands each week, producing over $2 million in annual sales.įor a buyer, they provide a secure certificate of ownership over a digital object, protecting the good’s value. “But we were as surprised as anyone.”ĬryptoKitties launched in 2017, sparking a ravenous collecting craze for the NFTs. “I wish I could tell you that we knew how it was all going to turn out,” admits Mack Flavelle, one of the cocreators of CryptoKitties. The most valuable CryptoKitties now sell for more than $100,000, CryptoPunks for over $1 million. They were originally given away for free. Two popular early NFTs were CryptoPunks, digital images of 10,000 human and animal characters in cutesy, 8-bit-style animation, and CryptoKitties, a collection of fancifully drawn felines. A small minority of NFTs are digital records of ownership of an actual, physical object.Īround 2017. Some are virtual goods existing only within the marketplace selling them, and some come packaged in familiar formats like a JPEG or a PDF. At the moment they’re mostly works of digital art or trading cards. When purchasing an NFT, you acquire both the unerasable ownership record of an asset and access to the actual asset. ![]() JOHN LAMPARSKI/GETTY IMAGES, STEFANIE KEENAN/GETTY IMAGES The Winklevoss twins own a competitor, Nifty Gateway. ![]() ![]() Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund is an investor in OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |