If you took a stroll around social media lately, you may have realized there is a concept that is constantly repeated lately everywhere with increasing presence. We're talking about NFTs… What are they about? I won't lie if I say I was the first one that a couple of days ago decided to dig in to find out what that was, although I had heard of it before during 2021.
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NFT, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are digital certificates that guarantee the property of almost any digital item. At first someone may wonder whether that is actually useful for something. But that is until until we see that people are selling works of art through NFT for quite high sums of money! These last few weeks several pictures and works made it to the headlines for getting into the digital market. Just to give you an example, the famous Österreichische Galerie Belvedere in Viena has created a copy of Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss" that has been divided into 10.000 unique squares that will be sold for 1,850 euros a piece. If you want to own a piece of this famous picture and you have over 2,000 spare dollars, it's your chance, don't miss it!
How does it work?
Maybe cryptocurrency, that have drawn attention for a while by now, might sound more familiar. Well, then NFTs base their technology on the same chain, with a descentralized process that consists in carrying out a transaction through the web by means of blocks with an inviolable print with the transaction's data, therefore guaranteeing proprierty.
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In addition, something that gives it exclusive propierties is that it is not possible to find two NFTs that are the same. They can be cut and pasted, but never duplicated. On the other hand, each NFT is linked to a digital guarantee certificate that makes it unique, indestructible and impossible to be stolen.
Important auction houses such as Christie’s or Sothebys, have raised in 2021 millons of dollars thanks to selling NFTs
In other words, the element it is all about, whether a text, audio, compressed file, image, etc., receives an identifier in which "personal" data are registered such as name, initial value, history, etc. and it is that information, that cannot be used, replaced, nor processed, the one that receives the monetary value that has generated a "craze" for the last months named by many people as "criptoart."
Key for the metaverse
The metaverse, that parallel world that has been created digitally and based also in blockchain, has NFTs as one of its pillars. As we discussed before some time in this website, a metaverse is a virtual place to connect with users and interact.
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Thus, NFTs and the metaverse keep a close relationship, particularly regarding blockchain games. Although NFT games are pretty recent, they are becoming increasingly popular quite fast, due to its sense as value holders.
An example of this relationship between the metaverse and NFTs can be found in the recent Australia Open, conquered by Rafa Nadal. The competition was celebrated at the same time in the metaverse and some NFT buyers obtained important benefits after the finals by selling "Art Ball" or parts of the circuit's very own court. Before each game, different Non-Fungible Tokens were generated and went up for sale among those whoe were interested. According to Ridley Plummer, director of the metaverse and Australia Tennis NFT project, the results were even better compared to those expected. "We never anticipated we were going to sell out everything in three minutes," explains Plummer, a Business Insider. "As a result, we set expectations high for NFTs to possibly become the future".
The art market, a perfect world for NFT
Given its qualities, the art world has become the perfect space for marketing these tokens.
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The first NFT is the "Quantum" digital object of artist Kevin McCoy created in 2014, which was associated to a property certificate and put up for sale in 2021.
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Important auction houses such as Christie’s or Sothebys, have raised in 2021 millons of dollars by selling NFTs. the record until now was reached by a jpg file of artist Beeple named "Everydays: The First 5000 Days" which consisted on a collage of digital daily creations thoughout the artist's evolution.
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In Spain, the digital space Art.Army has been created, with its own metaverse where to buy and sell NFT safely. It is a space that will be both a meeting point for artists and digital art experts as well as a selling platform, which has been working since last november.
