This March, the Everydays collage, created by Mike Winkelmann, better known as digital artist Beeple, was sold as NFT at Christie's Gallery for $69 million. For 13.5 years, the artist was publishing one photo, calling it “Every Day”. All these individual pieces - 5000 pictures - have been brought together to form EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, unique in the history of digital art. The whole world was seized by mass hysteria, the main question that was asked by both news feeds and ordinary people - is it really possible that someone is willing to pay for a JPEG picture as much as for an original by Van Gogh or Monet?
Beeple’s collage, Everydays: The First 5000 Days, sold at Christie’s. Image: BeepleEven though the fire of discussions about the fairness of prices for digital art has died down a bit along with a slight lull in the market itself, many are still wondering why people are willing to pay big money for a line on the blockchain. Let's understand what NFT is and why NFT has a great future (and not only in art).
NFTs are essentially non-fungible digital assets that reside on the blockchain. Thanks to the blockchain, you know who created the NFT and who are the current and previous owners. That is, lying that you have an NFT will not work - all tokens are unique.
When asked by CNN what he thinks about NFT and if this is all a bubble, Winkelmann replied:
“NFT is super exciting as a technology, and many people compare it to the early days of the Internet. In the early days of the Internet, we had a lot of hype and a lot of speculation, then there was a bubble that subsequently burst. But this did not destroy the Internet, people continued to use the Internet. "
I am more than sure that NFTs will make a real revolution not only in the field of art but also become that very "identity", a digital passport of a person. In fact, with the help of such tokens, it will be possible to vote, record data on work and education there, which will make a real revolution in all areas of our life - after all, the blockchain cannot be fooled.
When Instagram or Twitter irrevocably blocks accounts that they believe violate community guidelines, it seems that we are investing our energy, and time in developing not our digital profile, but these companies (both in terms of user acceptance and advertising revenue perspective),
This does not mean that companies are wrong - they ultimately have the final say on what can and cannot be published on their platforms. But what if we could definitely save all the content created for each platform?
For this to happen, we must truly own our digital content - and therefore our digital identity.
This is the future of NFT. As our world becomes more digital in terms of interactions between people, we will also need to own our digital spaces.
That is why I see the chapter “NFT and Art” as the beginning of a big story related to non-fungible tokens.