NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, are certificates of ownership of a unique digital item such as a video, recording, or cyber artwork.
These digital receipts reside on the blockchain (a digital ledger). Once an NFT has been “minted” – its code permanently woven into the blockchain’s DNA-like digital strands – it can be bought or sold with a cybercurrency. In March, an artist who calls himself Beeple auctioned a mosaic of digital images as an NFT that fetched the equivalent of more than $69 million.
Why We Wrote This
In the art world, value has traditionally been based upon scarcity. But nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are monetizing freely available digital items by placing valuation on the idea rather than the possession of a physical object.
Storming the ‘last bastion’: Angst and anger as NFTs claim high-culture status Holy fuck.
It’s as immutable as a transaction on the blockchain: Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, have permanently made their mark on art history. While the movement has some members of the arterati swooning at the notion of unwashed digital hordes laying siege to their domain, the reality is that the two worlds of high art and crypto are fated to become one and the same.
You might not have heard of Mike Winkelmann, but at least one art icon is ready to say he could rank up there with Pablo Picasso. The 39-year-old artist better known as “Beeple” has successfully forced his way into over a half-dozen different encyclopedia entries today after the sale of a career retrospective collage, “The First 5000 Days
, Mar 10, 2021
I was bound to get a couple of things wrong last time, on the tech side anyway but thankfully most denizens of the art world aren’t savvy enough in that regard (yet) to have attacked me for it, as they are wont to do. The art part of NFTs don’t live on the blockchain, but rather on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS, see glossary), which is a peer-to-peer computer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed fashion. There are many potential problems on the horizon for which no ready answers seem to exist. What if the IPFS is hacked, or the businesses running them somehow go under? Could there be NFTs shorn of their art? (some would say that’s the case already!) One DM-er complained that they couldn’t find any details relating to the technical requirements for image resolution sizes (there are none) and whether TIFF files are the best format because they are the most stable (probably yes, but anything goes as of now).