Crypto art — a modern day digital gold rush for art collectors and young artists alike
By Ryan Potts
Over the last few months, the cryptocurrency market has been booming, and for a plethora of reasons. As the stock market has been a trending topic, and cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin (₿ BTC), Dogecoin (Ð DOGE) and Ethereum (Ξ ETH) have been gaining more traction from the masses than ever before. A different form of tokenization has been steadily rising. However, this new crypto-boom is shaking up the digital art world just as much as the world of finance.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a special form of cryptographic token which are used to represent specific digital assets and are the latest addition to the world of cryptocurrency. These tokens are used to turn digital assets into their own unique items, separating them from any other version of them in existence. With this in mind, cryptocurrency wallet-holders, investors, art collectors and digital artists have found a way to create a new market for art. This allows for digital works, such as 3D animations, gifs, digital paintings, and even memes, to have as much value as a physical art piece. In turn, this new and quite mind-boggling phenomenon has started a new gold rush of sorts, or even a new art renaissance.
To put this further into perspective, the current highest-selling work in the NFT market was recently sold for $69.3 million, or roughly 39,000 ETH. What was the work in question? A collection of works by prolific digital artist and meme provocateur, Mike Winkelmann, most commonly known as Beeple. Winkelmann’s digital art has made at least $100 million across the market, and all of it can be viewed for free on both his website and social media platforms. Winkelmann is currently the highest selling artist on the market and is breaking records with each piece. Winkelmann is now among the top-three most valuable living artists in history after the sale of his “Everyday — The First 5000 Days” collection.
However, he is not the only individual raking it in with his digital works. Remember the Bad Luck Brian meme? It was sold on the NFT market for a whopping $40,000 (20 ETH). How about the classic Nyan Cat meme from 2011? Sold for nearly $540,000 (300 ETH).
How does it work? It’s relatively simple. Artists must first own a cryptocurrency wallet (the most common cryptocurrency used to buy and sell NFT works is Ethereum), upload their work to an NFT platform, and get the work minted. Minting is the process of tokenizing (giving monetary value on a marketplace) a digital asset and storing it in a blockchain, giving the work a unique identity so that it can be owned. Once the work is minted, the artist has the ability to include locked assets and specific metadata within the work, so that when it is purchased, the new owner has something special along with the piece — something that only they can have.
This new and fastly growing market is introducing a new way for digital artists to make money on their work. And it isn’t just chump change, these artists are now able to sell works for as much as artists who create giant, physical paintings. Works are being bought and sold on a day-to-day basis through several platforms and marketplaces, including Foundation App, OpenSea, Nifty Gateway and even Christie’s has bought in on the action.
Now that this new gold rush is here — where will it go next? Will you be taking a dive into this brand new phenomenon? If you do, be sure to do enough research to fully understand what you’re getting yourself into, as even the experts are learning new things about it every day.
