According to the DappRadar report, in September, the NFT market transaction volume surged by 1127%, exceeding 7 million U.S. dollars. Among them, the NFT digital collection and trading platform Rarible’s transaction volume accounted for up to 81% (about 5.5 million U.S. dollars).
NFT (Non-Fungible Token) is a non-fungible token. “Fungible” means homogeneity. The most common is currency. In the era of metal currency, every currency is the same. With the advent of banknotes, even though each banknote in circulation has a different digital code, the most important thing is the circulation value, which is not much different for users. On the contrary, “Non-Fungible” non-homogeneity means that different commodities of the same type have different meanings and values, such as artistic paintings, which are difficult to be standardized, and each painting is unique. The biggest difference between NFT and traditional cryptocurrency lies in this. Through blockchain technology, the uniqueness of the token is realized and its value is highlighted. In the DeFi wave, NFT has become an aesthetic representative in the crypto market with this art.
From ancient times to the present, from the West to the East, the interpretation of “beauty” is complicated. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato once said that beauty is an idea; Chernyshevsky in Russia said that beauty is life; Taoists in ancient China believed that the heaven and the earth have great beauty without saying anything;
Beauty is an image, it is not only the objective embodiment of things, but also the subjective concept of human consciousness. The rise of NFT is derived from the fusion of works of art and formulas, creating a unique form among cryptocurrencies and achieving a new type of aesthetics.
On October 8th, Block 21, the 21st piece in the Bitcoin-themed series of artworks in “Portraits of a Mind”, was sold at Christie’s in New York for $131,250, setting a record for the highest NFT auction price.
Image credit: Robert Alice / Ben Gentilli- “Portraits of a Mind” (Block 21)
With the advancement of science and technology, people’s pursuit of technology is not only limited to a string of beautiful codes, an elegant program, but eager to achieve a higher level of art. The blockchain technology is becoming more and more mature, and people have found a breakthrough in it, and digital paintings can be realized on this basis.
Image source: Robbie Barrat- “Saint Nazaire”
This is not only painting aesthetics, but also technical aesthetics. Sun Bohan, the founder of BCA (Block Create Art), once said that for the first time in history, a collector can truly own a digital artwork, enjoying its aesthetic value and economic premium.
The emergence of NFT has allowed art to escape from multiple disputes in the commercial economy, and it also reflects its artistic value. There have always been copyright issues in traditional works of art due to the lag of technology. A work of art, from its creation by the creator to the exhibition, to the first auction, to every subsequent rotation, the infringement in the process is unpredictable. When it reaches the last collector, whether it is still the original creator, we often don’t know, and the economic value increase in it is not owned by the creator itself.
However, NFT’s technology has solved the problem. When the artwork is encrypted, when the technology locks in the rights and interests, the artistic creativity and commercial value of the works are unified. Through NFT, the works will be marked at the beginning of creation, and every circulation will be recorded. Every collector can know the source of the work and the process of the transaction, and the creator can also get the economic benefits he should get.
Currently, NFT on Ethereum is mainly defined by two standards: ERC721 and ERC1155. ·ERC721
In January 2018, the four developers of Ethereum, William Entriken, Dieter Shirley, Jacob Evans, and Nastassia Sachs, proposed the Ethereum improvement proposal EIP721, which defines the ERC721 standard: The ERC721 standard implements a standard API and API definition for NFT in smart contracts A series of methods and events are introduced. ERC721 provides basic functions for tracking and transferring NFTs, including transferring tokens from one account to another, obtaining the current token balance of the account, obtaining the owner of a specific token, and the total supply of tokens available on the network. There are other functions, such as approving third-party accounts to transfer the number of tokens in the account. For example, transferring tokens actually means calling the transfer event of a smart contract deployed by a certain developer, and the ownerOf(uint256 _tokenId) method defines the number as the owner of tokenIdNFT. Each NFT token is marked with a unique tokenId in the ERC721 contract, and it cannot be changed during the entire contract life cycle. Through the contract address and tokenId, it can be ensured that each NFT is uniquely marked on the entire Ethereum blockchain. · ERC1155
The ERC1155 pioneered by the Enjin team brings the concept of semi-fungibility to the NFT world. Unlike ERC721, in ERC1155, token Id represents not a single asset, but an asset class. For example, a token Id represents “key”, and a wallet address may have 500 (500 Copies) such keys.
The difference between ERC721 and ERC1155 can be illustrated by the key above. If the user wants to transfer 500 keys, when using ERC721, it needs to call transferFrom 500 times, while using ERC1155, it only needs to call 500 transferFrom once. Realize the uniqueness of NFT through ERC721 and ERC1155. When encryption meets paintings, when art and economy no longer conflict, NFT brings aesthetics to a new era.
