Not long ago, I was listening to a podcast by Decrypt.co. The podcast was about crypto art and crypto-collectibles. I didn't know much about crypto-collectibles then, but the idea of having and selling your digital art on the blockchain hooked me on. Whether you are an artist, a designer, or just a hobbyist who likes to draw and create digital artwork, it is now time for you to bring your work to the next level, time to drop your masterpiece on the blockchain, and get paid for it.
Of course, crypto-collectibles are not new; this story started much longer ago, in the golden age of crypto, when CryptoKitties went viral in 2017. CryptoKitties operates on the Ethereum blockchain and allows you to buy a virtual unique cute cat for ether. You can sell it later if you want at market price, but before you have done it, it's owned by you and only you, which is validated through the blockchain.
This whole idea became possible due to so-called non-fungible tokens (or NFTs) which Wikipedia describes as:
A non-fungible token (NFT), also known as a nifty, is a special type of cryptographic token which represents something unique; non-fungible tokens are thus not mutually interchangeable by their individual specification. This is in contrast to other cryptocurrencies, and many networks or utility tokens that are fungible in nature.
We all know, that in the digital world it's not a problem to copy any information as many times as you want. And you can't tell the original from the copy because, at the end of the day, it is still the same bunch of bytes created by an algorithm, packed into a data structure, and stored in a computer's memory. And it has always been a huge problem to preserve copyrights and create scarcity or rarity. But now in the blockchain-based reality, we can issue a non-fungible token, which only one person can own and which is related to the original piece of work.
Photo by Timon Klauser on Unsplash
The invention of NFT has not only solved the mentioned problems but also stimulated and gave rise to the development of new perspective platforms and marketplaces for artists and designers.
One of such platforms is Superrare, an NFT marketplace for digital art. There you can apply as an artist and start tokenizing your work, i.e., hashing it and saving on the blockchain. Or you can be a collector and support aspiring artists bidding ether on their collectibles. Here is an excellent article that explains in detail how this all works.
Image from editorial.superrare.co
Another great project that is pushing the tokenized art to the masses is Cryptograph. There you can buy crypto art made by many famous people. But the Cryptograph team went even further, made the platform a philanthropical project. Money from every transaction is donated to charity.
Perpetual Altruism, the social enterprise behind Cryptograph, was founded by a team of entrepreneurs, impact investors and blockchain pioneers who believe in using technology to do good.
At the heart of the Cryptograph platform is the desire to support creators and the charitable causes that they care about. Every time a Cryptograph is transacted, money is automatically donated to the creator’s cause, forever.
© Cryptograph
But of course, this doesn't end just on artists and designers. The applications of NFTs are limitless. Yet another big niche that has been flooded by the NFT hype is the gaming industry. So many companies have emerged that either building their own games on blockchain or creating markets for non-fungible ethereum-based game assets. Characters, clothing, weapons, treasure, and other tools, you name it.
Business vector created by macrovektor - www.freepik.com
Earlier, in the pre-blockchain world, some sword or an armor existed only within a game infrastructure, on a game server. And it could cost a hundred of some silly golden coins, which didn't have real value in the real world. Today we can exchange game assets for crypto on those marketplaces, giving them real value and liquidity. And due to the blockchains interoperability, we can even move them from one game to another.
Some of the notable players in the field of blockchain gaming (and I'm currently a hodler of their tokens):
- Enjin (https://enjinx.io/eth/marketplace)
- Zilliqa (https://zilliqa.mintable.app)
- Decentraland (https://market.decentraland.org/)
In conclusion, just want to stress that this whole NFT industry is still so young and therefore it's a great opportunity for beginner artists to start tokenizing and selling their works. Don't wait until a big fish comes into the pond like big commercial companies once came on YouTube raising the bar of content quality so high, so it became almost impossible for a mortal blogger to survive there.
As always, cut the middlemen, blockchain the world.
