I just bought my first NFT.. here's what I've learnt so far
Talking through my first tender steps into the crypto-art world and why, if you are a creative practitioner, you should be getting involved
My own NFT can be viewed at https://opensea.io/accounts/APEP.
On Thursday, I became the proud owner of my first NFT, purchased on NiftyGateway, produced by the untouchable Jon Burgerman. The day before, I minted my own inaugural NFT on Rarible. I've tried to pick up as much as I can about how this space is evolving in order to play a part and feel like I'm in the room on this. As Taleb would say, I have some skin in the game, and I'm learning as I'm doing. But boy is it exciting as a creative practitioner to feel the tectonic plates underneath our digital feet shifting in vast and magnificent ways, and all for the betterment of the creators and the people who they create for.
At first it obviously all seemed very alien, but as I've got to grips with the technology that allows NFT's to exist, absorbing enough illuminating content produced by those who are adept and willing to assist others in understanding, I have confidently taken the jump on both sides of the non-fungible equation.
Since October last year I have been wholeheartedly immersing myself in the world of cryptocurrency. It started with me opening my three-year-old Coinbase account, hoping that my dusty coin’s values had multiplied tenfold; but that wasn't to be. However, unlike in 2018 when I skimmed the surface as a passive novelty, this time I headed straight down the rabbit hole. At this point I am comfortable in my understanding of the revolutionary potential of Bitcoin as a store of value, and the larger invention of blockchain technology in allowing decentralized digital entities to exist.
With all that said, I placed NFT’s in a box labelled, ‘to-be-worked-out-later’, alongside Web 3.0 and DeFi amongst a few others. However, as a multi-disciplinary designer I’m constantly seeking new and novel ways to to challenge my work and engage with other creators, and as someone who inherently dislikes the game of social media at an existential level, my interest and the energetic potential of the NFT world has spilled over. The time has now come to knuckle down and learn about how it works, with big things happening in the space every day at the moment (BurntBanksy, Kings of Leon, Beeple etc.)
… what are NFT's??
Short for “non-fungible token,” an NFT is essentially a certificate of authenticity that says your version of an endlessly copy-paste-able digital file (whether it’s an image, a video, a song, or virtually anything else) is the real one.
These NFT's exist on the second-biggest blockchain after Bitcoin; the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum’s blockchain was created to be a highly versatile decentralized computing platform, allowing developers to build a myriad of programs that make best use of the decentralized capabilities of the blockchain technology; from building markets for trading digital art to running a multi-billion dollar decentralised finance (DeFi) economy, tipped by many to change the landscape of markets. In an AMA hosted by the wallstreetbets subreddit, Mark Cuban shared his belief that DeFi would make “markets much more efficient, transparent and available to the small investor.”
The ideas underpinning the NFT market and the emerging potentials of the larger Ethereum blockchain is a rabbit hole in itself; but the short story is that this smart contract technology, and the tokens (NFT’s) built atop it, allow people to buy a virtual, digital-world property for serious real-world sums of money. This is why it opens up a completely new way for artists to interact with ordinary people in ways that exponentially benefit both in the integrity of value held in the act of exchange. These unique smart contracts allow for unique, designed interactions to be written with certificated authenticity on the blockchain. The flow of value between the artists for their work they create, and people wanting to be a part of that work and support the artists they admire can be rewritten with the trading of NFT’s in an open exchange, and it already is. In this alternative system, which is designed to economically empower individuals, capital will flow through open-source protocols that are faster, cheaper, more transparent, and available to all.
One example of this in future action comes from YellowHeart founder Josh Katz, in regards to Kings of Leon who this week became the first band to release an album as an NFT. He said that going forward this technology can be used for ticket sales, which could be a huge advancement in the secondary market. Every time an NFT is resold, a percentage of money earned could go to the artist — or whoever is included in the contract, perhaps even a charity.
The band is actually dropping three types of tokens as part of a series called “NFT Yourself”. One type is a special album package, while a second type offers live show perks like front-row seats for life, and a third type is just for exclusive audiovisual art.
That is a small window into how early we are in the adoption of this technology, but also how huge it could be in terms of shaking up how the creative industries reward the artists for the value in their art.
The Artist, the Collector, the Maker
In three collated tweets I believe I can demonstrate the revolutionary change that has been unboxed with NFT's and blockchain technology. First we have the Artist, in this case Jon Burgerman whose work I have bought myself this week in my first foray into owning a slice of crypto-art:
As a fellow creative I can relate to the struggle in getting by doing what you love to do, suffering the daily grind with the slim hope for financial comfort around the corner to maintain creative momentum. In one NFT drop, Jon has received reward equal to his craft and his commitment to imagination directly from people who want to be a part of his journey and who, in return, get a unique piece of digital art that no one else can ever own. In a world where it feels like only by selling your soul could you climb out of a fallacious dream of making art and being able to live off that art, this is an incredibly exciting shift in narrative.
Here, 3LAU brings to light how the intimate connection existing between an artist and the people they inspire with their creative light can now generate a true flow of revenue based on the emotional value inherent in the work. Previously, artists have had to rely on large enterprises in charge of gated, centralised platforms to float their ideas and creative practice on in order to connect with people. Of course these centralised entities have taken advantage of the artist's lack of power in the relationship and have arm-locked much of the profit from them without any alternative for the artist.
"Over the last 20 years — two lost decades — we’ve seen the devaluation of music. Music has become great at selling everything except music. There’s been a race to the bottom where, for as little money as possible, you have access to all of it. Previously, it cost $20 to go get one song.” He believes streaming’s subscription-based pro rata model irreparably hurts artists, and NFTs will make modern fans want to own music again: “It’s early stages, but in the future, I think this will be how people release their tracks: When they sell a 100,000 at a dollar each, then they just made $100,000.”
- Josh Katz, Founder of YellowHeart.
Finally, the awakening of the maker:
This perfectly encapsulates how the dive into NFT’s has awoken my own drive to create and engage with the crypto-art community. It invites everyone out there to maybe put a pause to their default habits of aggressive cultural consumption in order to pick up a pen, an instrument, a camera and forge a sovereign and imaginative path of their own. There is space for everyone on these platforms, to create anything from 24x24 pixel CryptoPunk art to grand landscapes of hyperreal digital dystopias. Find your voice and find your people.
These three angles on the energy that is growing around NFT’s demonstrate how it is transcending the old model and enabling a completely new dynamic of globally shared, human imagination. Spaceship Earth has found it’s wings.
My Inaugural NFT Release!
Take a look at https://app.rarible.com/apep!
It never even crossed my mind to buy someone else’s piece before I’d put my own work out there and understood what it was to mint an NFT on the blockchain, and I did so through Rarible. The work is viewable below, but the ownership of the art is open to anyone who pays the 1 ETH price I have placed on the piece.
Fears of an Ecological Impact - Demystified
A large argument that came up against NFT’s recently was the claim that in the act of creating an NFT, we were directly causing ecological harm that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise. In other words, the creation of NFT’s was bad for the environment. If this was true, it should be taken very seriously by those involved.
However, I discovered an article by SuperRare that explained the flaws in this argument and dispelled some of the myths in these critics’ claims. In the article SuperRare stated that minting & trading NFTs does not increase Ethereum’s carbon emissions. They didn’t deny the fact that the mining of Ethereum wasn’t an energy intensive process, but they cleared the air around the generation of NFT’s as directly increasing the ecological impact involved in mining ETH.
Transaction throughput (i.e. the number of transactions that the system can process) is independent of the network’s electricity consumption. Adding more mining equipment and thus increasing electricity consumption will have no impact on the number of processed transactions.
SuperRare themselves are taking measures to balance the ecological effects of the Ethereum network by offsetting carbon emissions in the short-term, and in the long-term donating money to ETH 2.0 research to accelerate the development of a more energy-efficient network, based on proof-of-stake, as opposed to proof-of-work.
By early 2022, the fisrt stage of Ethereum 2.0 should be released which is intended to be a lot more energy and environemtally efficient, transforming how the blockchain is verified into a proof-of-stake system, which takes a lot of the overall computer power necessary right now away. So in time, I believe we will be on the right side of the fight against ecological disaster. Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, himself is a vocal proponent of the fight and so we are being steered in the right direction.
Conclusion
In a final note, as my grandad stands in front of me in the kitchen today, he says: "Amazing. Technology. In another 10 years makes you wonder what technology will be like?" I had to bite my tongue before I started preaching the blockchain.
It feels like NFT’s are a brand new technology, but they’ve been brewing for a number of years now with certain explosive moments, CryptoKitties and CyberPunks being the notable ones in their somewhat short history. The momentum is only getting growing and gaining strength as it leaks its creative potential into multiple creative sectors; music, art, gaming, and who knows what else around the corner.
There is a learning curve, but there are so many incredible people out there who are acting as watchful guides to help people like me through the mist and fog, and so there is no time like now to take a leap and start applying yourself as a part of these changes.
I’ll finish with a list of sites that I have made use of in my own learning curve:
nfts.tips and follow @alexandermazzei
The Non-Fungible Token Bible: Everything you need to know about NFTs
In order to begin making and buying NFT’s head to these marketplaces: