New Avenues: Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs
Though its been around for several years at this point, 2021 has witnessed the boom in popularity of the Non-Fungible Token, or NFT. To be honest, not long ago I had no concept of what this meant, but after doing some research and receiving lots of encouragement from the community, I decided to mint my first piece and enter the NFT space.
I am not the one to describe what an NFT is to anyone in detail, so if you truly want to know what the fuss is about and what an NFT actually is, be sure to check out the NFT bible . My short description of an NFT goes like this: think of baseball cards. There are tons of Babe Ruth baseball cards out there, but there are only a few that have been signed by Babe Ruth. Those cards are special because of that signature, and when they go on sale, the price of that signed baseball card will be higher than a non-signed card. That special nature, or rarity by another name, is an easy thing to prove in the physical world. In the digital world, proving ownership of a digital artwork which could be copied and pasted anywhere is not so easy.
The NFT is to a piece of digital art like a photograph, gif, video, or 3D rendering, as a signature is to a real baseball card. The Non Fungible Token provides proof of ownership and makes a digital piece of artwork that could be copied anywhere on the internet into an actual unique item. By assigning a piece of art to a one of a kind NFT that lives on the publicly viewable blokchain forever as having been “minted” by the original artist, that digital piece of artwork becomes a tradable item that cannot be duplicated. Yes, you could still copy a gif assigned to an NFT and paste it anywhere, but you can’t actually copy the NFT itself or prove that you own it, since this information lives publicly on the blokchain.
This allows unique digital artworks to be sold and collected, thus giving digital artists the same kind of access to collectors as artists exhibiting in the real world. Online marketplaces like Foundation, Opensea, Rarible, and SuperRare, could be considered galleries for artists to display their work and for collectors to… well, collect them.
The beautiful part of the NFT, in my mind, is the very fact that the token itself is the thing that changes hands. The collector could look at that digital piece of art anytime they want simply by copying, right clicking and saving as, etc. A collector purchases an NFT not necessarily to gain anything new, except to say that they actually own that piece of artwork no matter how many copies of it exist on the web. There can only be one owner. This puts value on the artwork, and makes the collector a true patron of a given artist, since it is pure ownership that they are paying for, thus supporting the artist to allow them to continue making work.
I am eager to explore this space further and expand to other marketplaces, as well as collect some artwork myself.
