Benjamin, a 12-year-old boy in the United Kingdom, drew a series of paintings during his summer vacation and sold them online as digital collections. They were all sold out in less than 9 hours, and the virtual currency he earned was equivalent to 250 million RMB.
These paintings are not very high-end works of art, but are composed of densely packed pixels of various shapes of whales, each whale has its own decoration and color matching, just like the emoticons we often send to others when chatting . And this set of Weird Whales has a total of 3,350 whales of various shapes and colors.
what is nft
Simply put, it is a digital product signed using blockchain technology. For example: In traditional society, a painter or poet would sign his name and stamp his seal after finishing his work. This means that he owns the work. So what about in the digital age? For example, making a picture into an NFT is equivalent to stamping the seal of ownership, giving the picture a unique identity certificate.
The full name of nft is the abbreviation of Non-Fungible Tokens, which means non-fungible tokens, which are relative to interchangeable tokens. Non-fungible tokens are also known as non-fungible tokens. What are fungible tokens? For example, tokens such as BTC and ETH are homogeneous tokens, so they are interchangeable with each other, that is to say, your ETH and mine are essentially the same and have the same attributes ,price. Non-fungible tokens, or non-homogeneous tokens, are unique, like works of art, each one is different. They cannot be replaced by each other, so they are called non-fungible tokens or non-homogeneous tokens.
Therefore, although you can easily copy a picture that is exactly the same as the above whale, and you can get almost the same visual enjoyment as the buyer without spending a penny, but your picture is worthless .
nft madness
Let's take a look at some of the nft works that have sold for sky-high prices.
First place: Everydays: The First5000 Days $69 million
Beeple's everyDay was sold at a sky-high price of $69.3 million. He combined all the works in the past 13 years to make a Jpeg work, which sold for 6930 at Christie's auction house. It was sold at a sky-high price of US$10,000. Ranked first in the nft rankings, ranked second, third, and fourth are four works of cypherpunk. They are:
Second place: CryptoPunk #7523 $11.7 million
In Sotheby’s online auction on June 10, 2021, CryptoPunk #7523 was sold at a high price of $11.754 million, setting a single auction record for Crypto Punk .
As for why CryptoPunk7523 can become the most expensive collection in the series, it is said that only 2% of the mask designs in this series are shared, which can be said to be appropriate and rare.
3rd place: CryptoPunk #7804
3rd place and 2nd place are from the same series: CryptoPunk.
At first glance, this is a group of punk-style pixel avatars. In the early years of the forum era, we can see many avatars with similar styles. However, it is indeed the most expensive collection series in the NFT market today. Because it is the earliest NFT issued in Ethereum.
The Crypto Punk series of avatars was released in 2017. At the beginning of its release, as long as you have an Ethereum wallet, you can request a series of avatars for free. But now that the popularity of NFT has skyrocketed, the avatars of this series have already been listed on the NFT trading list.
And CryptoPunk#7804 can fetch a high price of 4200ETH (the current price is about 7.5662 million US dollars), which is said to be because there are only 9 avatars with alien attributes in the series, so they are quite precious.
Fourth place: Cryptounk #3100
Another alien series cryptounk #3100 wearing a headband, sold for 4,200 ETH ($7.51 million) in March 2021.
These pixelated avatars are just three of 10,000 avatars made by two programmers, all of which were freely available in 2017. In addition to these works of art, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey's first tweet also commanded a sky-high price of $2.9 million.
From these sky-high prices, perhaps we can see some clues, not only the works of celebrities or professional artists can fetch sky-high prices, but also the works of ordinary people. Especially seeing that the few works that fetched sky-high prices are all pixel-style, many people are thinking: I can draw this too, and it can be better than his. It is the idea that I can do it, but we have not earned it, which fuels the explosion of the nft network. But is it really that simple?
The celebrity effect of nft
The popular NBA star Stephen Curry (Stephen Curry) updated his avatar (a BAYC NFT wearing a tweed suit). The avatar is that he spent 180,000 US dollars (55 ethers, about 1.16 million yuan).
Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, bought an NFT avatar for US$10.5 million.
Later, Justin Sun said in Moments that he bought a new ape avatar for US$15 million in TRX.
Sun Yuchen said that NFT avatars are the gallery of our generation, and the money spent on picture avatars has exceeded the money spent on Picasso's works. (Picasso spent a total of 20 million US dollars in auctions this year, and 25 million for his head portrait.)
Of course, there are other celebrities, we will not go into details here. Could it be that they invested a lot of real money to buy a computer picture? ? Is the world really crazy? Next, let's take a deep look at nft.
Number one of every day? The buyer who spent 69 million US dollars is said to be not a collector, but a fund called metapurse. This buyer quickly released a token called b20 a few months before the ranking. After taking pictures of this work every day, his b20 has risen from $0.36 at the beginning to $28. This buyer has earned a lot of attention in the auction, and made a lot of money after deducting the auction fee, so the painting Buying a computer picture at a high price is not because the world is crazy, but the buyer may be deploying a bigger game.
The meaning of nft
If you are an artist.
If you're an artist and you have some cool work, do you have other better outlets to sell it? At this time, nft can provide you with a good way. NFT can generate your copyright information in the blockchain, and you don't have to worry about piracy.
In addition, when others take away your work, they only obtain the ownership of the work, and the copyright still belongs to you. At this time, you can enable a function of NFT, which will pay you a certain percentage of royalties every time NFT is sold or changed hands. This is one of the reasons why nft is so popular with creators.
If you are a buyer.
One of the obvious benefits of buying art is that it allows you to financially support your favorite artists, and the same goes for NFTs. Buying an nft usually also comes with some basic usage rights, such as being able to post the image online or set it as your profile picture.
Of course, you can also collect some of your favorite nft works like Sun Yuchen, the founder of Tron, who claims to be a collector.
An NFT can also work like any other speculative asset, you buy it and hope that its value will go up one day so you can sell it for a profit. It may also be like taking pictures of metapurse every day, in a larger round to obtain higher profits.
is nft a huge bubble
The current market of NFT and these frenzied operations must be a huge bubble. That's why beeple, who sold a sky-high price, immediately converted the received cryptocurrency into cash, and it was safe.
But the technology behind nft must have positive significance for future development. Just like the Internet bubble more than 20 years ago, it did not destroy the Internet, but only made it develop healthier. Just like the cryptocurrency itself is not recognized in many countries, but the blockchain technology that builds the cryptocurrency behind it has been developing vigorously. Therefore, using the traceability and non-tampering characteristics of nft technology, digital versions of various documents such as ID cards and driver's licenses can be produced. At present, some companies are trying to make physical objects such as houses into NFT. If it enters a purely digital virtual world like the metaverse, nft will enter a larger system.