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+title= "Is NFT art already over?"
+date = "2021-08-16T00:04:55+08:00"
+tags = ["NFT"]
+type = "blog"
+categories = ["NFT"]
+banner = "https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/fit-in/900x510/https://www.forbes.com/advisor/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/NFT.jpeg.jpg"
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+
+## Is NFT art already over?
+
+#### NFTs are the hottest new crypto trend, but not everyone is on board. Here's why artists are turning against NFTs.
+
+Supporters say NFT art gives creators better control over their work and more opportunities to make money. Digital artist Beeple sold a digital collage of his digital drawings for £50 million and became the face of NFTs. But with some artists making so much money, why are many other digital artists strongly against it?
+
+The idea behind NFTs is you sell the ownership of your art or register it to yourself as the creator, similar to a certificate of ownership. The spectre of piracy and digital art theft is consigned to the bin, right? Not quite, an assigned NFT won't stop someone opening or downloading your art. Confused? [Read up on the finer details of NFTs](https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts)[.](https://www.creativebloq.com/features/what-are-nfts)
+
+The idea is sound, just. NFTs feel like a step in the right direction towards enabling artists to control where and how their art is used. Some artists are making life-changing fees from the sale of NFTs, or simply making sales of digital projects easier. So what's the problem? 
+
+NFTs, the downside
+------------------
+Chances are, if you’re reading this then you’ve had somebody right-click and save your own art. You’ve probably had somebody share or repost your work without proper credit or permission. Maybe you’ve even had somebody pass your work off as their own. NFTs can help with this.
+
+You’d have every right to see NFTs as a way for you to regain control of your art and maybe even make a little money doing it. You’re unlikely to make untold millions, but even a small fee is better than having your work taken from you for nothing, isn’t it?
+
+“There is absolutely an issue of redistributing and sharing art without credit,” [Catherine Graffam](https://www.catherinegraffam.com/) says. “However, I don’t think NFTs solve that problem. In a vacuum NFTs can appear like a solution to this. But in reality the money made from NFT sales, especially by new artists, won’t counter the fees associated with actually ‘minting’ NFTs.” 
+
+Original art has value
+----------------------
+Graffam, an artists and art teacher, recently posted a [YouTube video](http://ifxm.ag/c-graffam) titled NFTs (are worse than you thought) | ARTISTS BEWARE. Catherine included research by the Canadian artist Kimberley Parker, who found that half of NFTs sold made less than the equivalent of $200, and 34 per cent sold for under $100. If you put an NFT up for sale for $100, the fees you’d be charged would be between 72.5 and 157.5 per cent of the sales price. That’s an average of 100.5 per cent which means an average loss of about $0.50.
+
+So the average artist isn’t going to get rich from NFTs. But doesn’t an NFT add more than monetary value? The original artwork is more enriching to the viewer than the print, the first-edition book somehow more magical than the paperback reprint.
+
+“I think those analogies don’t quite translate,” Graffam says, “at least for me, because there’s a physical and tangible difference between a print and an original painting, or a reprint. You could argue that NFTs are attempting to set up the provenance that gives originals their value for digital goods, but the experience is the same to the viewer regardless of whether or not you own the NFT.”
+
+“I don’t think it’s a fad, but the market is so volatile – and is clearly already dropping in popularity – that it won’t be as radicalising as NFT supporters believe it will. A lot of people will always want physical versions of an artwork they can hang on their wall and can experience everyday. No amount of giving digital goods inflated value and scarcity will change that!”
+
+Are NFTs a threat?
+------------------
+
+Graffam’s YouTube video comprehensively and compellingly lists numerous other ways NFTs are bad, a big one being their effect on the planet, which is a massive concern for [Natasa Ilincic](https://www.natasailincic.com/). 
+
+“My aversion towards NFTs stems mainly from their environmental impact,” Ilincic says, calling NFTs a “conceptually and emotionally empty ticket.” 
+
+Technology magazine Wired recently reported on another high-profile NFT auction. French artist [Joanie Lemercier](https://joanielemercier.com/) – a climate activist – recently put six NFTs up for auction on [Nifty Gateway](https://niftygateway.com/). They sold for thousands of dollars in 10 seconds. The sale consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to two years of energy use in Joanie’s studio, then sold again – another year’s worth of energy. 
+
+“The system is similar to the one that verifies Bitcoin,” [Gregory Barber wrote in Wired](https://www.wired.com/story/nfts-hot-effect-earth-climate/), ”involving a network of computers that use advanced cryptography to decide whether transactions are valid – and in doing so uses energy on the scale of a small country.” 
+
+“NFTs,” Ilincic says, “expend a ridiculous amount of energy to produce ultimately nothing. Considering the current situation and global warming, I believe that participating in this scheme is deeply unethical.”
+Ilincic’s latest art book, A Compendium of Witches, is a collection of stories about 29 witches and their various historical settings: “My art explores the spiritual relationship with nature,” she says. “If I were to support practices that are hugely detrimental to our planet, it would render my art meaningless. Art is about communication – if my actions undermine my message, I might as well do something else.”
+
+Joanie said he had no idea how much energy his NFT auction would consumer, and cancelled his next two auctions – priced at $200,000. Not all artists are willing to do the same. 
+
+Advertisement
+
+“I’m sad to say that I have lost respect for many members of the art community for this,” Ilincic says, “not only for disregarding the environmental impact, but also for – this applies to the big names – funnelling younger and/or lesser established artists into this pyramid scheme, ultimately exploiting them.”
+
+Are NFTs over?
+
+“Personally,” [Alexandria Neonakis](https://www.alexneonakis.com/) says, “I think they’re a fad… in the time you’ve sent me these questions the whole market seems to have crashed, which is a thing crypto people swear is just part of it, but I dunno… it all feels so bizarre to me, I don’t want anything to do with it.”
+
+Neonakis is right. In the time it’s take to plan and write this article, NFTs have (depending on who you believe) crashed, peaked and crashed again. Early in June, [Crypto news site Protos.com](https://www.protos.com/) reported: “The NFT market has imploded over the past months, with sales in every single category almost entirely drying up. NFTs peaked on May 3, when $102 million worth were sold in a single day. The crypto-collectibles market made up $100 million of those sales.” 
+
+Other crypto news sites reported NFTs had crashed back in April, so who knows what will have happened to NFTs by the time this article exists in the form of a tangible print magazine.

webSite/content/blog/nftshakingart.md

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+title= "THE NEW DIGITAL TOKEN CRAZE THAT’S SHAKING UP THE ART WORLD"
+date = "2021-08-16T00:04:55+08:00"
+tags = ["NFT"]
+type = "blog"
+categories = ["NFT"]
+banner = "https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/fit-in/900x510/https://www.forbes.com/advisor/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/NFT.jpeg.jpg"
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+
+n February, 32-year-old entrepreneur Jessie Schwarz purchased a non-fungible token (NFT) of an NBA Top Shot video clip of a dunk by basketball superstar LeBron James for $208,000, along with some friends, and paid for it using FLOW tokens. By doing so, Schwarz is now the owner of a token that certifies he rightfully owns that specific video clip, even though anyone can watch the clip on NBA Top Shot, or indeed on YouTube, for free.
+
+Mr. Schwarz’s purchase represents just one of many forays into NFTs that investors have made this year, purchasing digital collectibles for seemingly extortionate amounts that veered into the tens of millions of dollars. Other examples include Twitter’s chief executive officer, Jack Dorsey, selling his first-ever tweet as a newly minted NFT for 1,630.6 ether, the digital currency of the Ethereum blockchain, which at the time was equivalent to $2.9 million; the sale by electronic music producer 3LAU (Justin David Blau) of a collection of limited edition NFTs for $3,666,666, which brought his NFT sales of 33 unique items in total to some $11,684,101; and a 10-second video artwork by the artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) that sold for a cool $6.6 million. So, what is driving the extraordinary craze for these NFTs?
+
+But first, the basics. NFT stands for _non-fungible token_. In some ways, NFTs are similar to cryptocurrencies and digital assets such as bitcoin and ether, to which the world has increasingly become accustomed. But they are also different in several crucially important ways. Primarily, the main difference is that an NFT is tied to the value of a specific asset, such as a digital artwork, and thus serves as a certification of ownership of the asset. CryptoPunks was among the first NFTs to be released on Ethereum—and remains hugely popular today. This project has been influential in the development of NFTs, particularly with respect to digital art, with all of the 10,000 CryptoPunks characters in existence designed to be different from one another through their underlying codes.
+
+The non-fungibility of NFTs, moreover, means that they are in scarce supply; although one bitcoin has no discerning difference from another, an NFT is one of a kind with very limited availability. This uniqueness underpins much of their lofty valuations, as they can’t be exchanged like-for-like. As such, an NFT acts as a digital document of the asset’s authenticity and ownership that can’t be replaced or changed.
+
+The popular cryptocurrency news publication CoinDesk also highlights four additional characteristic properties that NFTs typically possess:
+
+1.  **Non-interoperable:** As an example, CryptoPunks cannot be used as characters on the CryptoKitties game—another popular project based on collectible digital cats—or vice versa. This also applies to collectibles such as trading cards.
+2.  **Indivisible:** Each NFT exists as a whole token and thus can’t be divided into smaller denominations, unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin satoshis.
+3.  **Indestructible:** By using the blockchain and smart contracts to secure all stored data related to each NFT, a token cannot be destroyed, removed or replicated. Immutable NFT ownership also means those who purchase such tokens are their rightful owners rather than the companies that created them (unlike music-streaming services, where users purchase a license to listen to the music rather than owning the music itself).
+4.  **Verifiable:** The use of blockchain technology means that historical ownership data can be traced back to the original creator, thus enabling pieces to be authenticated without the need for an external third party.
+
+Indeed, most NFTs are issued and traded on the Ethereum blockchain as an ERC-721 Non-Fungible Token Standard. This type of token can store more information pertaining to the asset that the NFT represents and thus operates quite differently from an ERC-20 token, which is the typical standard used for all smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain for token implementation.
+
+Such characteristics elevate NFTs above standard cryptocurrencies and enable them to be used for virtually anything that can be stored digitally, such as gameplay, music files and digital art. Indeed, it is the latter that arguably is the most fascinating use case for NFTs, especially given the disruptive impact NFTs are having on the global art industry. Indeed, with the advancements made in distributed ledger technologies, digital collectors can possess the immutable ownership of assets such as art, while investors can also seek to profit from them just like any other asset class.
+
+There are material benefits of using the NFT method. For creators, they can sell their works directly to buyers without involving intermediaries in the process. This improved transaction efficiency allows creators to retain more profits and prevents buyers from paying fees at their ends. What’s more, artists can receive more royalties from NFTs as they can be programmed into their digital artworks, thus enabling them to receive shares of sales whenever their works are sold on to other buyers. “It’s chill. It’s easy to buy, it’s easy to sell, it’s easy to hold, it’s easy to look at on your phone,” US entrepreneur and NFT- and crypto-enthusiast Mark Cuban recently said. “We value things that are digital. It doesn’t have to be only physical any longer.”
+
+With such considerations in mind, even the most respected names from the art industry are getting involved in the NFT craze. Auction house Sotheby’s is among the latest to announce its entry into the market through its collaboration with digital artist Pak and specialist NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway with the sale of The Fungible Collection, a “novel collection of digital art redefining our understanding of value”, for more than $17 million. Nifty Gateway also hosted an auction that included a digital illustration by Beeple, whose digital work “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” was sold by Christie’s for a whopping $69.3 million. The buyer, Singapore-based crypto enthusiast Vignesh Sundaresan (also known as MetaKovan), is the founder of Metapurse, a cryptocurrency fund that launched the public-art project B.20 earlier this year that seeks to transform “the experience and ownership of art” and contains 20 Beeple NFTs purchased in December.
+
+With such activity being witnessed, it is no surprise that NFTs have experienced a massive boom this year, with some digital artworks selling for mind-bogglingly expensive figures. Indeed, sales of such tokens surged to an enormous $2 billion in the first quarter of this year, according to figures from NonFungible.com, which is some 20 times more than 2020’s final quarter. The NFT tracking site also noted that there were more than twice as many buyers than sellers in the first quarter—73,000 buyers versus 33,000 sellers, further underlining the bullish sentiment in the NFT market at present. According to the company, it is “a signal of massive interest in newcomers, but also of the desire of current owners to keep their assets, which creates a phenomenon of scarcity in the market”.
+
+But as has been the case across the broader cryptocurrency complex, as well as other markets such as equities and special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), discussion abounds over whether NFTs have already entered bubble territory. Even Beeple himself admitted as much, telling popular crypto news outlet CoinDesk, “I think it’s a bubble…. If it’s not a bubble now, I do believe it probably will be a bubble at some point, because there’s just so many people rushing into this space.” He also acknowledged to CNN in March that he “might be the big winner” of the bubble. However, it must also be observed that the current NFT market capitalisation of around $30 billion is just a fraction compared to other perceived bubbles of recent times, suggesting there is more room for investors to enter going forward. “The aggregate value of NFT platform tokens is worth 2x more than Squarespace. Is that a bubble?” Ikigai Asset Management’s Travis Kling tweeted in late April.
+
+Another concern when it comes to NFTs is the environmental impact that results from minting such tokens. Each Ethereum transaction’s carbon footprint is currently more than 40 kilograms of CO2 (carbon dioxide), according to Digiconomist, which provides an Ethereum Energy Consumption Index. With consistently more computing power required per transaction, more resources are used up. And while “green” NFTs are now gradually increasing in circulation, they represent a small fraction of the NFT landscape. As is the case with most cryptocurrencies that utilise a “proof-of-work” blockchain-consensus mechanism, such as bitcoin and ether, environmental considerations are given alarmingly little attention.
+
+Nonetheless, for artists keen to enter the digital space, NFTs could end up being a goldmine—or, perhaps, at least a way for them to earn a decent standard of living. They also facilitate direct, more intimate relationships between artists and their supporters by eliminating the need for middleman brokers to be involved in transactions. And as a relatively new marketplace, there will undoubtedly be an evolving process of price discovery during the coming months. As with all things crypto and token-related, how the space matures and becomes more legitimate will be particularly interesting to observe.