So you heard about Beeple making 3.5million in a weekend with it?
Crypto art is an umbrella term for a system used to verify ownership of a digital piece of art. Image, video or gif.
The basic concept is: if you have extra money, you can now buy digital art ownership and brag to your friend that you are the owner. You can also re-sell it. with the bonus that the original artist gets a % of the sale if the art work rises in price when you sell.
There are 2 basic people who buy crypto art.
- collectors/patrons. Who want to support the artist. Hang a plasma on the wall which shows off what art they own. Think digital picture frame. Friends come over, the owner can brag that they just bought this for $5.5k. Same as with physical art. Obviously no one is stopping you from just playing the images and telling your friends you own them. I’m sure they will. But it’s possible to log on to the websites that deal in crypto art and check who the owner is and how much it costs. Or you can directly check the block chain, which has a record of the whole life of the token. Who created it, who bought it, who big on it, who the last owner is.
- Speculators. People who buy it in the hopes of selling it for more later.
There is a bunch of stuff like drops, basically “releases” some images have one edition, some have a run of 20. it’s up to the artist to decide. But you got to remember that the more you have, the cheaper they will be.
But so what?
The original problem is that all digital art is not distinguishable from the original, as you can have an unlimited number of identical copies.
This method, watermarks each digital file using blockchain, and “tokenizes” them, giving the same value as a signed artwork. In the past, you could own a limited reproduction of an artwork, for example in silkscreen, but only the ones with the original artist’s signature had any real value. Essentially, you are getting a digital signature embedded in your artwork.
The artist can chose to make more copies, but can’t duplicate that particular signature, just like with real art, where you can get a “perfect” fake that looks like the original, but isn’t.
This thing is verified by a public block chain. Which is basically like a public book that records all transactions. And it’s authenticity is verified by a large network of nodes, compromising the users of the network. Think of it like a wikipedia page, where when you make a change everyone else who has used it has to go: “yup all good” and then an offline copy is updated and stored on everyone’s computer.
Popular crypto art marketplaces:
Nifty Gateway
https://superrare.co
Now remember that this is isn’t for everyone. Much of the crypto art is sold for a couple of dollars. But the concept has shown to appear viable. The main thing you need to know: This is a method to monetize art you make through collectors and sponsors. Think of this like making your own digital baseball cards. Where you can verify who the owner is and track sales of them.
Good Luck in this cyber world we are entering!
-Aleksey
