Social media powerhouse Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey announced that he intended to sell his first ever tweet on the platform from 2006 as NFT, or a non-fungible token which is essentially cryptoart.
The auction began in December 2020, and the highest bid is currently around $2.6 million for the tweet. Whoever eventually wins the auction gets an autographed digital certificate that will be signed using cryptography and include the original tweet’s metadata.
Dorsey intends to convert whatever money is raised to bitcoin, which he then intends to donate to an African relief charity. This new development brings up the question “What is NFT, and what is Cryptoart?”.
Cryptoart is revolutionizing the digital art and digital collectibles landscape. It is simply a way by which digital art is assigned unique features, thereby making it very valuable. Ordinarily, digital art is easily replicable because of its nature, being digital information.
With cryptoart however, such art is made unique by NFTs. An NFT simply is like a unique ID number assigned to a particular digital art piece. With this NFT, a digital art can only be involved in a transaction once at a time, after which it gets flagged by the computer systems that constitute a blockchain because before any transaction occurs, it must be validated across the blockchain, and since there is no central location for the blockchain whatsoever, every single computer in the said blockchain must agree that the piece of digital art has never been traded.
In essence, this means that no two people can own a single piece of cryptoart at the same time. It is however possible to make copies of the digital art and spread them although they would not possess the unique NFT the original copy has.
Cryptoart is sold at a very expensive rate, with its price reaching up to millions of dollars in some cases.
It is bought and sold with Ethereum, and has its value calculated in the cryptocurrency which is worth over $1400 per unit. Marketplaces for cryptoart sales include Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, Rariable, OpenSea, Block Party, Makers Place, and many more. A Nyan Cat gif was bought for up to $600,000, and digital artist Beeple sold several his works for over $3.5 million in 2020, and Mr Dorsey’s tweet is going for over $2.5 million.
I bet that there will be digital art pieces worth tens of millions of dollars in coming years. This shows how profitable cryotoart can be.
For all its success in creating unique art, the cryptocurrency and cryotoart industry consumes extremely enormous amounts of energy.
It is said to take weeks, months, years or even decades of the average energy consumption of a European household to create a single NFT, and most of this energy is wasted as there are usually errors during the mining that lead to wastage of efforts of the miners.
This is for just one NFT,and some centres mine multiple NFT in a single day. After just over a decade of activity of the cryptocurrency market, it has become a market that utillises more energy than the whole of Argentina without a regulatory body of any sort.
Cryotoart also creates artificial scarcity of digital art, as well as offering no intellectual property rights. In a world where environmental and ethical issues have become important bones of contention, it is important to note that while cryptoart changes the landscape in digital arts dealings, it also has its own flaws which need to be attended to swiftly.