Remember the days when we played WWE cards and there was a trump card that defeated all of them? Well, well, well! There’s yet another breakthrough in the digital world that can inspire all aspiring artists to become millionaires. The world has a term for it, we’d simply like to call it New Found Technology. Nevertheless, let’s go with what’s trending in the market anyway – It’s called Non-Fungible Tokens. Yes! It is true that digital artists can swim in money like Uncle Scrooge with the right usage of Non-Fungible Tokens.
So, what in the world does that term even mean? Explaining the definition of Non-Fungible Tokens to a layman would be a difficult task. Understanding it first and explaining it would be even more challenging honestly.
Imagine – you trade one cryptocurrency: bitcoin, dogecoin, whatever, for another. You basically have the same thing. That’s a fungible token.
Now, imagine you traded some old stamps for it. Those stamps are unique and irreplaceable. That’s technically non-fungible. In simple terms, Non-Fungible Tokens are unique digital units that cannot be replaced with something else. These digital units are part of a digital ledger, popularly known as ‘Blockchain’.
Why is that artists would love to trade in NFTs? Now that’s a big question! Artists get to commodify their digital art with NFTs. Any kind of digital art, be it for video games, music files, digital artworks… all that can be converted into NFTs and can be put up for auction. Even your tweets can be auctioned, for cryin’ out loud.
Death of the old – a 50-second video by Grimes, was sold for a whopping $388,938. But, why pay millions when you can just right-click and download the video anyway? Well, there can be a million copies of the original. But, there can be only one original. When a buyer makes a particular purchase, he/she also gets the bragging rights to call it their own without being labelled as ‘plagiarised’. The ownership of the art is transferred to you, though the creator can still retain the copyright to reproduce as many copies as they want and re-sell them as the original.
Does it really matter if you own the original or a copy? Well, that depends on the purpose of your purchase. Why do you really have to trade NFTs?
If you are a buyer, then the purpose is clear as day. You would trade NFTs to support artists and create a ‘Digital Kalaghoda Festival’ sort of an environment. When you buy an NFT, you get some basic usage rights, and you are all set to post about it all on social media and brag about it.
If you are an artist, this is THE marketplace for you to make it big. NFT also has this ‘royalty’ kind of a feature where you get paid in commission amount every time the artwork that you’ve sold, is re-sold or changes hands.
If you are neither interested in buying, nor in selling, you must be an art enthusiast who likes to collect art for the sake of investment. When the art value appreciates in time, you’d sell it for a considerable amount of profit.
What’s advertising got to do with it? Well, at 3 Dots Design, we love to talk about new technology that’s all about buying and selling: technically that’s what advertising is all about too, right?
There’s a lot to talk about the Non-Fungible Tokens which is quite demanding to cover all the points at one go. It’s like watching Christopher Nolan movies and reading Dan Brown novels at once. So, we are going to break this article down into two parts so that we can discuss more on NFT and where it’s going. Stay tuned.