NFTs – Giving The Ownership Back To The Artists

“Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique, digital items with blockchain-managed ownership. Examples include collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and even ownership records for physical assets.” – OpenSea

We all know about starving artists and musicians nowadays.  If someone posts an image online it’s chick chock boom before it gets stolen if it’s cool.  And we’ve all heard the cries of the musicians, most of whom can no longer even dream of using music to make their livings.

But nowadays, musicians can sell their assets online via NFTs and only those people with valid ownership are able to listen to them.  Read more about Rocki, an NFT selling platform for musicians and the last $26,000 windfall for an Israeli/Malta DJ here.

And being a digital visual artist at this point was never known to be the most lucrative of professions but check this out:

1. animated flying cats with Pop Tart bodies making almost $600,000 in profit
2. a Banksy impersonator making off with almost $900K in profit
3. Cryptopunks and their bitmapped retro digital baseball cards selling for thousands of dollars

The impact of this new market is staggering and is going to change a lot of things.  And that’s just with people buying the rights to say the piece of art, or music, or whatever is up there is an authentic, authorized copy.  It’s not like the artist is selling over all the rights to the piece.  It’s kind of like making sure you buy the NBA hat with the hologram vs. the $10 knockoff from Chinatown.  

DIGITAL OWNERSHIP

Chris Torres created a Nyan Cat meme that has been spewed across the Internet everywhere but he made about $580,000 after a bidding war when he put a unique NFT up for sale on Foundation.

The Pop Tart Cat article explains, “Other digital tokens recently sold include a clip of LeBron James blocking a shot in a Lakers basketball game that went for $100,000 in January and a Twitter post by Mark Cuban, the investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, that went for $952. This month, the actress Lindsay Lohan sold an image of her face for over $17,000 and, in a nod to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, declared, “I believe in a world which is financially decentralized.” It was quickly resold for $57,000.”

We all know how easy it is to swipe digital media like images, music and movies.  But blockchain technology (read all about it here) already allows artists to sell their work with a unique proof of ownership.

Just think what the future could hold – the most obvious example I could see is where when someone buys an album or listens to a song, the media player needs to see that NFT as proof of ownership for it to be played (and I’m looking forward to see all the ingenuous ways of getting around that, LOL)

We already see how games like NBA Top Shot  and Gods Unchained are making megabucks while allowing people to keep control of their own assets within the games. 

In 2019 anyone who rioted for Hong Kong vs China faced an uber smackdown.  International gaming company Blizzard, in response to Chinese threat of shutting down its Chinese market, shut down a vocal Hearthstone Grand Master’s account and rescinded his prize money.  Read a full account of that story here. 

This happened:

The artists keep their rights.  The buyers keep the products they spent their ETH on.  And everyone is happy.  Where do you think this is going to go?  Let us know in the comments.