17/12/2021 NFTs market hits $22bn as craze turns digital images into assets

Critics of non-fungible tokens say they are symptomatic of unsustainable digital gold rush

Dan Milmo
Artworks titled Bored Ape Yacht Club, left, and The Last Warrior by Sepand Danesh, right, at the Portrait of an Era NTF exhibition in London.
Artworks titled Bored Ape Yacht Club, left, and The Last Warrior by Sepand Danesh, right, at the Portrait of an Era NTF exhibition in London.Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

The global market for non-fungible tokens hit $22bn (ÂŁ16.5bn) this year as the craze for collections such as Bored Ape Yacht Club and Matrix avatars turned digital images into major investment assets.

NFTs have drawn from veteran investors similar warnings to those issued about cryptocurrencies: that they are symptomatic of an unsustainable, digital gold rush. NFTs confer ownership of a unique digital item – whether apiece of virtual artby Damien Hirst or a jacket to be worn in the metaverse – upon someone, even if that item can be easily copied. Ownership is recorded on a digital, decentralised ledger known as a blockchain.

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Data from DappRadar, a firm that tracks sales, showed that trading in NFTs reached $22bn in 2021, compared with just $100m in 2020, and that the floor market cap of the top 100 NFTs ever issued – a measure of their collective value – was $16.7bn.

The most valuable NFT sale this year wasThe First 5000 Days, a digital collage by Beeple, the name used by the American digital artist Mike Winkelmann, that was auctioned for $69.3m in March, making it one of the most valuable pieces of art ever sold by a living artist. Another Beeple NFT,Human One, sold for $29m.

Other multimillion-dollar NFTs included theBored Ape Yacht Club, a collection of 10,000 NFTs represented as cartoon primates that are used as profile photos on the social media accounts of their owners and which raised $26.2m. Celebrity BAYC owners include the talkshow host Jimmy Fallon and the rapper Post Malone.

DappRadar said a key factor in the surge in NFT trading was mainstream businesses entering the fray.

Coca-Cola raised more than $575,000 from selling items such as a customised jacket to be worn in the metaverse world of Decentraland while the Matrix star Keanu Reevesfailed to keep a straight facewhen told by an interviewer that hisMatrix film seriesnow had NFTs attached to it.

“Hollywood, sports celebrities and big brands like Coca-Cola, Gucci, Nike, and Adidas, made their dent in the space, providing NFTs with a new level of exclusivity. The power of attraction of these famous names profoundly impacted NFTs and the blockchain industry overall,” said DappRadar.

Football fans have been targeted with NFT marketing – including with NFTs backed by the former England players John Terry and Wayne Rooney – and have been warned by experts that they are risky assets, unregulated in the UK. It will take years before NFTs behave like a conventional market, said George Monaghan, analyst at research firm GlobalData.

“2021 NFT activity was frenzied. That’ll subside in coming years and NFTs will settle into something more akin to today’s modern art market, where consensus on value is more solid. That said, it’ll be years before any crypto market, let alone NFTs, comes to resemble anything conventional markets would call stable. I wouldn’t throw your rainy day fund into any meme NFTs quite yet,” he said.

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Arts

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/16/nfts-market-hits-22bn-as-craze-turns-digital-images-into-assets

Interesting NFTs
The Scion
A young figure caught in a moment of distraction, aware only ephemerally of his unconscious being, as it engages in psychological and psychedelic layer spaces. His right arm casually cradles a moray eel; the figure is comfortable but not truly aware of the potentials for danger in such negligence. His shirt reads “Bello” in Pokemon style font, harkening back to a childhood straddling the millennial threshold. To his right side, out of the unconscious deep, shrouded alien heads propagate as a fractal totem, each new iteration a more sophisticated rendering of emotional masking over the cold mystery of the greys. As the scion of the Budgie-Sattva, the young man, in his distraction, is also simultaneously aware of higher levels of self discovery. To his left a psychological topology sets beneath the oracle side of an 8 ball ,hovering; its message a purest concept of acceptance. The “Scion” lettering is in 80’s HeMan style bold declaration. The lower right side of the painting is like a hybrid of melon, feathers, and seeds. The crystals in the background bring light; conducted, refracted, reflected, and dispersed, to balance the dark shadow of the figure’s physical body. The aura of the scion succeeds in layers to point, with a finger, and the crown chakra, toward a center of a mandala existing as nigh pure application of strokes, in essence painterly abstraction, but also revealing hints of the Aura of migraine, and the bi-hemispherical nature of the brain–noting concerns of the possibility of inherited mental disease. Yet the flourish of chakra as it sets against that center is robust, active, coherent, and reveling against all fear. Fundamentally, the piece speaks to the activation of one’s potential to begin to “Know Thyself”, and find greater awareness out of the enigmas of the mind–as an inculcated seed given to the rich soil of one’s own birthright.
4-777-a-ee
Good day! I'm 4-777-a-ee. I enjoy picking on mice, being a nevernude, and hitting on yo' man. I was voted most likely to work at NASA in college. Maybe you and I can be partners in crime.
Smile to Shreds, Neon Gwen
The First KayPikeFashion Mint Ever. Ever feel so joyful and were grinning so hard you felt you could split in half? That punk rebel yell of glee when you pull of a particularly refined stunt? This is the paint of dreams, fangs and neon. Hellish and hard to pull off. I was able to with this work quietly paint a sweet inner tale of childhood influences, rat fink and autobody shops. All while pretending to paint gwenom for the audience. More on that in bonus material. This is my alternate animation made specifically for crypto art collectors. It will only ever exist in this format. You get the Shiny, unused in media verified image. More on that in the bonus material. Mixed Media: Bio/Digital. Glycerin on 5'9" human skin 10-14 hours Performance art. Shot on Canon EOS RP. 16 + hours Photoshop and DaVinci Resolve. All Works are SFW. Art has been Seen on the front page of Reddit, Featured in the New York Times, Galileo.tv, and multiple other promotions including Twitch.tv, Disney Interactive, RIOT games, WB games, AMD and more! More on how this art is unique and potentially explosive in the NFT world: https://youtu.be/CXbNF2Y6srs ------------------------- The purchase of this NFT Grants the buyer unique bonus material. Physical Mail Bonus Package: A verified physical Art Print. Autographed from the artist in 12x16. Please allow a few weeks for delivery. Digital Bonus Package: This image in .mp4. An "About the Art" Video and an "From the Artist" introduction. A README.txt about the artwork with some personal notes and Links relevant to the artwork.
Classical Collage
voronoi fun with some well known art
My Other Half | Inspired by Minecraft: The Last Minecart (2011)
Almost every year, we capture ourselves in a way that no photo or video is capable of: with a photoscan. If you dig through our archives, you'll find many of them and can see exactly how we change over time. Sam Gorski, Creator | I wanted to find the oldest scan of myself and put him side-by-side with Sam from the present. While it is hard to look at it and not miss the years past, at the same time, this gives me hope for the future by embracing and cherishing the change in my life. How would I have gotten this far without him? About This Piece | Sam on the left was captured in 2014, while Sam on the right was captured last week (2021). This work represents the personal, creative, and emotional journey in all of us, and the hope that ourselves tomorrow may be better than ourselves today.