From blind boxes, Hanfu to sneakers, young people who love it will spend a lot of money. A 10 billion market was born and hundreds of billions of listed companies were hatched.
But if I tell you that if someone spends millions of dollars just to buy a 10 second video or a JPEG picture, normal people will probably say that this person is crazy. How thick is this leek?
In fact, there are quite a few such people, and more and more people are rushing forward. Behind these seemingly crazy behaviors, there are irrational fanaticism similar to bitcoin investment, but it also makes people see the possibility of changing the status quo of the Internet world.
Recently, the stock market and bitcoin's "losing their mothers" have made many investors want to cry, but in another trading market, it is the opposite.
Not long ago, pablo rodriguez Freile, an American art collector, sold his collection for $6.6 million. He bought this collection on June 5438+ 10 last year for only $67,000, which means that the value has increased by nearly 100 times in less than half a year.
This collection is not a famous antique painting, but a video created by digital artist Beeple. The duration is only 10 second, which is probably the highest price per unit time in history.
This work is called Crossroads. In the video, a naked "giant" who looks a bit like Trump falls in the grass on the side of the road and is painted with graffiti of various slogans. Passers-by completely ignored the monster.
No matter what the special significance of this video is, just like you and me, all users can watch this video online. Why would anyone want to spend millions on a 10 second video?
It should be noted here that the buyer of this video is not an ordinary MP4 file, but an encrypted digital file with the artist's signature, a digital asset called NFT (non-homogeneous token).
The next part of this article will introduce NFT in more detail. Now all you need to know is that NFT is unique, unchangeable and unrepeatable.
In other words, although this video can be spread on the Internet for unlimited times, it is actually a "fake" and the only "genuine" is the buyer's hand.
It is this "uniqueness" that can be authenticated that makes such digital works of art have transaction value.
Even Christie's auction house, which has a history of more than 250 years, has joined the ranks. Not long ago, it auctioned an NFT artwork for the first time-a picture consisting of 5,000 photos.
It is reported that within 1 hour of the auction, the starting price of this work was raised from 100 to 1 10,000. After 124 bids, the transaction was finally made at the price of $3 million.
This work is called "Every Day-the First 5000 Days" and was also created by digital artist Bishop.
Bip is a big man in C4D circle, and he is very good at creating with 3D drawing software. His work style is called "post-apocalyptic art", which combines popular culture with future scientific and technological elements and reflects current thinking.
Bip's works
Since 2006, Beeple has launched a series of "Everydays", that is, creating an illustration every day and posting it on social networks. So far, this series has never stopped.
In an interview with The Verge some time ago, Beeple said that it has become as natural for him to brush his teeth and eat every day, even on the day of his marriage and the birth of his child.
The pictures of Christie's auction are composed of works from the first 5000 days of the "Everydays" series. But this is not the first time Beeple has auctioned his works in this form.
Last year, in June+February, 5438, Pipper tried to auction his works in the form of NFT on the blockchain art platform Nifty Gateway. In the end, all 22 works were photographed, and the most expensive one was sold for $770,000, and the total price of all works reached $3.5 million.
As a digital artist, Beeple is very famous, but it is very difficult to directly sell his works in the virtual world. It is often necessary to co-name with the brand and take the physical object as the carrier to become a commodity.
LV 2065 438+09 Spring/Summer Collection has 13 pieces of clothes printed with the pattern of Beeple〖Everydays〗], including KAWS previously co-branded with Uniqlo. Although the work may sell at sky-high prices, it is worthless if only 0 and 1 form a digital form.
However, now the appearance of NFT is changing all this. It can make digital works of art that only exist on the Internet have the same value as Mona Lisa, and art is no longer divided into entity and virtual.
Why does NFT have such great magic that a video and a picture can sell for a sky-high price?
"NFT" can be translated into heterogeneous tokens, which are digital assets in the blockchain field. You may think of bitcoin, but they are essentially different.
Bitcoin is the same as the RMB we usually use. The value of any two hundred-dollar bills is exactly the same, and a hundred-dollar bill is also converted into several smaller bills.
And "NFT" is unique and irreplaceable, which is "heterogeneity" Each digital asset represented by NFT has unique value, which cannot be directly converted into other non-functional digital assets, nor can it be sold separately.
Griffin Cock Foster, the founder of Nifty Gateway, once described the characteristics of NFT as follows:
The last NFT lap was at 20 18. A blockchain cat-raising game called "CryptoKitties" became popular. Every virtual cat collected and fed by players is carried in the form of NFT, which makes each cat have a unique "genome" in the virtual world.
The recent revival of NFT began with a platform called NBA Top Shot. NBA star cards and selected videos are made into NFT for users to buy and trade.
Five months after its launch, NBA Top Shot has attracted more than 654.38 million buyers, with sales approaching 250 million dollars. The most expensive transaction at present is LeBron? A video of James dunking was bought by a user for $208,000.
Through NFT, these creators not only get rid of the limitation of physical media, but also get a certain percentage of commission every time their works change hands after the first sale, which is also an important reason why more and more creators embrace NFT.
Noah Davis, a post-war and contemporary art expert at Christie's, said that NFT is democratizing art collections in a rather radical way.
The above-mentioned artworks certified in the blockchain and traded in encrypted currency are all called encrypted artworks, and have gradually become a new creative medium in recent years.
The rise of "encryption art" can not only help digital art creators to better reflect their own values, but more importantly, it can enable many creators to complete their creations that traditional physical media cannot achieve. Digital art is no longer just an online work in the physical world.
Among them, AsyncArt is the experimental art movement that can best reflect this feature. Through blockchain technologies such as NFT, we can discuss "how art is programmed".
AsyncArt's digital art works are not completed by one person, but are divided into Master (main canvas) and Layer (layer), and each layer can be modified by different creators to become an independent NFT.
For example, AsyncArt's first work, First Suppe, imitates the famous painting "The Last Supper", which has 22 floors, with characters, backgrounds, decorations and other elements corresponding to different floors.
According to calculation, the first floor has at least 36,543.8+300 million different combinations. If you change layers every second, it will take nearly 1000 years to see all the forms of this work.
This reminds me of an activity launched by Reddit on April Fool's Day a few years ago. On a huge blank canvas, users can choose a color every once in a while and then click a point on it. The activity time is limited to 72 hours.
Unexpectedly, netizens of different races and colors all over the world spontaneously organized themselves and completed a series of amazing works, which became a miraculous performance art on the Internet, as Huo Ju said:
The same is true of the above-mentioned programmable encryption art, which is the embodiment of Internet decentralization in digital art. Cao Yin, managing director of Digital Renaissance Foundation, believes that the programmable encryption art is an affirmative movement, which makes the concept of "everyone is an artist" by the famous German contemporary artist Boyce no longer just a slogan.
Ann, the curator of SuperRare, who has held encrypted art exhibitions for many times, pointed out in an article that if Andy were alive today, he would definitely create pop art with digital currency.
NFT gives new value to digital art, but it brings more possibilities to the Internet.
At present, NFT is gradually known because of its application in digital art, but it is still relatively few, but it may be applied to more fields in the future.
NFT can mark all assets in the real world and virtual world and prove their ownership. With more and more consumption going digital, we often no longer have the ownership of digital assets, but only the right to use them for a period of time.
With the trend of closer integration between offline and online, digital assets will also become an increasingly important property for everyone. But the defect that digital content is easy to be copied is a problem, as Taylor Winklevoss, the founder of Nifty Gateway, said:
For example, NFT is expected to provide a new possibility for digital content plagued by piracy, such as online music, movies and TV.
Last year, ROCKI, a music NFT platform based on blockchain, went online, which not only solved the digital copyright problem of creators, but also brought new sources of income and ways of fan interaction, thus attracting many musicians to join.
Giovanni Colavizza, assistant professor of digital humanities at the University of Amsterdam, said: "Symbolization can change the way that works of art create and exchange value. 」
Of course, as a new thing, NFT itself is not perfect. For example, transactions based on blockchain are often not bound by the existing financial supervision system and have certain risks.
In addition, although NFT has unique characteristics that cannot be tampered with, theoretically it will always exist in the virtual world. However, the longest life of available storage media is only about 60 years at most, and the preservation of digital assets is still inseparable from physical media.
Just like artificial intelligence and face recognition, new technologies are always accompanied by various problems. But this does not prevent us from looking forward to the future of NFT, and a new digital world is being born.