Recently, the popularity of the DeFi market has gradually declined, various protocol machine gun pools have “rusted”, mining revenue has declined, and capital has begun to explore new market hotspots. NFT (Non-fungible token) was pushed to the front, and funds flowed into the NFT market.
In the past month, the monthly volume of Ethereum-based art platform SuperRare reached US$777,000; the monthly volume of OpenSea, the largest NFT market, also exceeded US$2.75 million. Both platforms hit a record high.
NFT is a digital asset with unique and irreplaceable attributes. It has standardization, versatility, liquidity, and programmable features. Common application scenarios include collectibles, game items, digital art, certificates, domain names, etc.
Digital artwork is transformed into encrypted artwork due to NFT. The mode of buying and selling on U disk and CD-ROM in the original gallery has also been transferred to the chain. When the transaction process becomes open and transparent, technological innovations such as AI have also begun to add digital artwork. Create the world.
Changes in trading and creation are transforming the art market and also disrupting the world of crypto assets.
$130,000 encrypted painting breaks NFT auction record
During the “October 1” holiday, mainstream DeFi assets such as YFI and UNI continued to decline.
According to OKEx, at 3 pm on October 8th, UNI temporarily reported US$2.71, which fell below the opening price of US$2.84 on September 17th. In the past 7 days, YFI also fell from a minimum of US$20,500 to US$12,260 and suffered a cut.
Weibo big V “Super Bitcoin” said with emotion, “While the machine gun pool is rusting, it is smashing the disk.”
DeFi liquidity mining is cooling down, NFT (Non-fungible token) is brewing, trying to take over DeFi and become the next hot spot in the market. After entering October, new records one after another are being born.
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.
NFT is a non-homogeneous digital asset that has unique and irreplaceable attributes. Standardization, versatility, liquidity, and especially programmable features make NFT assets unique. The Ethereum ERC-721 standard is the first standard for non-homogeneous digital assets. Common NFT applications include collectibles, game items, digital art, certificates, domain names, etc.
The Block 21 sold by Christie’s at a high price is a work of art in the NFT asset. It is a portrait of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin. This series of works was named “Portraits of a Mind” by the author Ben Gentilli. There are 40 works in total, and Block 21 is one of them.
Each of these 40 works contains part of the original Token. In the smart contract, only the conditions set by the author can be triggered to see the full picture of this series of works.
Block 21 is the epitome of the market’s attention to encrypted artworks. Just one day before its auction, DeFi Arts Intelligencer (DeFi Arts Intelligencer) calculated that in the past month, the monthly transaction volume of the Ethereum art platform SuperRare reached a record high of $777,000. As of October 8, SuperRare’s transaction volume in the past 7 days was $262,000, which is one-third of last month’s transaction volume.
In addition, the monthly trading volume of OpenSea, the largest trading platform in the NFT sector, exceeded US$2.75 million, breaking records.
According to statistics from the NFT data platform nonFungible, on October 8, the historical turnover of NFT assets also reached a new peak of US$131 million. On August 18, this figure was 104.7 million U.S. dollars, and within two months, it rose by nearly 27 million U.S. dollars. You know, starting with CryptoKitties, the NFT asset market has existed for nearly 3 years.
The basis of total value growth is the increase in the average price of a single NFT asset. According to nonFungible data, on July 16, the average price of a single NFT asset was US$38.1; by September 1, it had risen to a maximum of US$371, which was almost 10 times that of more than a month ago.
It can be seen from these public data that some funds are flowing into the NFT trading market.
Digital artwork on the chain changes the traditional transaction mode
NFT asset transaction data continues to rise. Relying on the birth of computer science and technology, artworks with technological attributes are being introduced to the encrypted asset trading market in the “revolution” of the blockchain.
In addition to the conditions for digital art to be traded on the chain, the shortcomings of the traditional trading market are also part of the background.
In the traditional digital art market, most of a transaction takes place in a gallery. The works are exhibited in the gallery, the buyer pays, and the creator copies the works to a USB flash drive or CD and delivers them to the buyer. This model has obvious shortcomings-on the one hand, there is less chance of exposure of the work; secondly, after the buyer gets it, he can make a copy and continue to trade on the secondary market, and one work can be sold to multiple buyers.
For creators, it is impossible to truly own copyright; for collectors, the uniqueness of works of art is eliminated in the repeated reproduction and dissemination, and the collection value is reduced.
The emergence of NFT under encryption technology has just changed this situation. When digital art is transformed into encrypted art, the rights and interests are locked in technology, and the creative wisdom and value circulation of the work are combined into one.
Sun Bohan, the founder of BCA (Block Create Art), said in a recent interview that NFT has enhanced the fluidity of traditional digital artworks and to a certain extent can also preserve the uniqueness of works. He believes that the NFT based on the blockchain network solves this series of problems. After the digital artwork is on the chain, it can record the creator of the work and the process of each transaction. After being on the chain, everything is open and transparent.
He also mentioned the interesting part of NFT technology-it can realize the combination of two NFT works, and then form a new work, “For example, the work “The First Dinner”, which is jointly by 13 early crypto artists Completed.”
Public information shows that Sun Bohan graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. In 2018, he founded BCA, the first domestic brand that focuses on the field of cryptocurrency artistic creation and new culture research and development. He is also an early player in the domestic market that focuses on digital art transactions.
For collectors, Bohan Sun also mentioned in a public interview that NFT provides a way to mark the ownership of native digital assets, giving digital artwork authenticity and scarcity. “For the first time in history, collectors can To truly own a digital artwork, enjoy its aesthetic value and economic premium.”
He further explained that the value of NFT is not only reflected in the owner’s control of their own rights and interests, but it can also certify the real world and form a digital asset world with interconnected values and information. Due to the non-homogeneous and inseparable characteristics of NFT, it can anchor the concept of commodities in the real world. In the future, digital art can be circulated and segmented based on the blockchain, with better market liquidity, and it will be easier to exchange value with other non-similar assets.
But he also pointed out that NFT will not give the subject extra value. He explained that NFT is a value carrier and will not affect the value consensus of the upper-level subject. “It provides a change in the form of the value carrier, not the subject itself. Change. Therefore, it needs to form a consensus on the value of its own subject matter before NFT can play the superiority of the carrier.”
NFT artwork is not limited to paintings, audio and video works on stage
While the trading market is changing, digital art creators are also evolving. Humans in the biological sense are no longer the only “artists”. AI (artificial intelligence) is entering the world of digital art.
In the creation of traditional art works, it is more dependent on the personal thinking and thoughts of the creator; in AI creation, although the artist can “train” the machine in the way he likes to form a data model, it is difficult for the artist to control the final creation result. This is not only unexpected and interesting, but also regarded as one of the shortcomings of AI creation.
Someone is changing this situation. The 21-year-old artist Robbie Barrat tries to get rid of the control of algorithms. According to the report “Robbie Barrat, A Great AI Art”, his work “Saint Nazaire”, which he launched last year, used AI for the first time while trying to express the artist’s own emotions through his work.
Cao Yin, managing director of the Digital Renaissance Foundation, collected this work. “Saint Nazaire” is considered not only an important milestone in Robbie’s creative career, but also an epoch-making work of the entire AI art, with important art history value.
As for the creator himself, he has stated that artificial intelligence will become one of the largest art movements in this century.
Robbie Barrat entered the famous Saint Nazaire School of Art in France in 2019 to study and establish a studio. In addition to an artist, he is also an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford University and an artificial intelligence algorithm engineer at NVIDIA.
At the age of 18, Robbie Barrat has made a breakthrough in the field of neural networks. He has not only taken over the rap AI trained by Kanye West lyrics, but also studied the use of plant electrical signals to create art. He invented the famous art-specific AI algorithm art-DCGEN, which is now commonly used by many digital art creators. tool.
With the blessing of computer technology, current NFT artworks are not limited to art works in form, music and video are also integrated into it.
In an online exhibition not long ago, Sun Bohan showed a series of “Destroying Company” created by domestic digital art creator Chi Lei-I love GUCCI. This work incorporates elements such as music and video.
Whether it is technological innovation or the diversity of artwork carriers, there will always be some feedback in the price market of works.
As early as 2018, a work created by Robbie using an AI algorithm was sold at a high price of US$432,500 at Christie’s in New York.
In the statistics of nonFungible platform, the average price of artwork is also the highest among common NFT assets such as games and collectibles. As of October 8, the average price of art NFT assets was $136, and the historical average prices of collectible NFT assets and game NFT assets were $15.3 and $15.7, respectively.
The visualization of NFT assets gives it more sensible scenarios than the various “air coins” used for hype in the currency market, but because it can be marketed and enter the investment field, there are also risks.
Industry insiders remind that once capital is impacted, NFT assets will deviate from the normal price like other assets. “This requires investors to control risks when investing in related assets and look at NFTs with speculation. May be disappointed.”
