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When Canadian artist Trevor Jones graduated from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland 14 years ago, he was quickly confronted with the harsh reality of the art world.
“I did quite a bit of exhibition and gallery exhibition,” he told Al Jazeera. “But there was no way to pay the bills. I was doing three different jobs at the time. ”
In the early 2010s, he became interested in the intersection of technology and art, and began experimenting with QR codes and augmented reality. These issues received a warm response from the established art world, but it progressed. In 2017 Bitcoin invested in the rising cryptocurrency, which immediately lost its money in the 2018 crash.
“I knew I was a much better painter than an investor,” he said jokingly. “But it opened up a whole new world that I could explore through painting.”
Since then, he has worked on cryptocurrency, mixing classical painting and cryptography, often with pieces of digital art attached as non-fungal tokens (NFTs).
NFTs are the only digital file based on blockchain technology – the same technology that anchors Bitcoin – and the sitting blockchain book verifies who owns that single digital asset by giving it its origin.
NFT’s demand began late last year, and this year interest in them exploded, along with Jones ’fortune.
His first NFT project was sold in 2019 for $ 10,000 – a huge amount of money at the time. In October 2020, he sold a Batman NFT with comedian José Delbo for $ 552,000. Then this February, he sold 4,158 editions of his most famous work, Bitcoin Angel, which he mixes with Bernini’s crypto-images of The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa for $ 3.2 million.
“When you’re a poor painter and you’re struggling, you want to sell your work to pay rent and put food on the table,” Jones said. “It’s a struggle to be creative in those conditions. Now I’m in a position to partner with Ice Cube. “
Pixels and background
NFT has contributed to this year’s biggest art sales.
The gold shot was released in March when U.S. artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple, sold an NFT of his digital artwork Everydays: The First 5000 Days. A whopping $ 69 million Christie’s auction house.
Christie’s NFT trading platform also partnered with OpenSea in late November to charge for the trend. Famous people like Paris Hilton, Snoop Dogg and Lindsay Lohan, as well as the inventor of the World Wide Web Tim Berners-Lee Make and sell NFTs this year.
Another major trend was the spread of avatar-like portraits sold as NFT. The most popular space project is called CryptoPunks. At the time of writing, the lowest CryptoPunk price could be bought for $ 242,918, while the most expensive was $ 7.58 million.
Bored Ape Yacht Club, which includes celebrities Jimmy Fallon and Steph Curry, among others, sold a bunch of 101 NFTs at a Sotheby’s auction for $ 24.4 million in September.
Beyond the boast of being at the forefront of a new cryptographic trend, investors are also ready to believe that pixels of added origin will continue to be desirable collectors.
“When you do an NFT there is always a limited number,” said Al Jazeera Yan Ketelers, a CMO in Venly, a Belgian startup that builds NFT markets. “Every time you sell, it registers in a blockchain.”
These NFTs can be sold by their owners, creating a fertile ground for trading in NFT markets such as OpenSea or Nifty Gateway.
But while NFTs take advantage of the property rights granted by blockchain, they also suffer from a large carbon footprint of the technology.
Most blockchain networks are based on so-called miners, whose equipment – often made up of thousands of energy-intensive computers – rushes through complex math puzzles and rewards the winner with cryptocurrency.
The Ethereum blockchain, which is registered in most NFTs, now uses more power than the entire Philippine country. “This digital system has a huge impact on the real world,” said Alex de Vries, owner of Digiconomist, a site that calculates the energy usage of blockchain networks like Ethereum.
In his day-to-day work, de Vries is also a member of the financial crime unit of the Dutch central bank. “That’s not what we want in a time of climate change, when we need to reduce our emissions,” he said.
But for blockchain supporters, this is a temporary problem. According to Keteles, miners are rapidly moving to clean energy sources, and blockchain systems are experimenting with new ways of doing business. Venly, for example, often uses Polygon, a network that is still built on top of Ethereum, but uses a system that reduces the energy use of proof of work systems to 99 percent.
“I don’t think environmental criticism makes much sense yet,” Ketelers said.
However, according to de Vries, the problem has not yet been resolved. More eco-friendly blockchain networks exist, but larger ones like Ethereum continue to eat away at energy. Ethereum has also been trying to get away from the proof of work for years, but so far it has not been successful.
And while skeptics may dismiss NFT as a fad, evangelicals say the “metaverse” – a vague term used to describe a more immersive future version of the avatar-filled Internet – is ready to push the mainstream through apps like video games. , Venly’s main business.
“Imagine that everything you build or buy in a game becomes your property,” Ketelers said. “It becomes part of your identity, and you can also sell assets.”
That is already happening on one level. In 2018, according to Juniper Research, the market for gaming skins, the market for cosmetic refurbishment of in-game items, was $ 30 billion in 2018. However, with NFT, players could own these items, independently of game developers, and even start marketing in third-party markets, which could boost the virtual economy.
Venly supports game developers like Atari with such ideas.
But just like cryptographic bubbles in the past, NFT hype may also fall apart in the future. “I learned how fast things can take off in the world of crypto, but also how fast they can fall,” Jones said. “Bitcoin has often been called dead in recent years, but it continues to rise like a phoenix.”
That’s why Jones is preparing for volatility. He hasn’t bought anything weird with his new wealth, just a new car (despite being a Tesla). And next year he will rent Stirling Castle in Scotland to host a party for collectors who own his art, which he sees as a luxury, somehow, but a good deal.
“I need to grow my brand and community to survive in the bear market,” he said. “There will be a lot of artists who will disappear, and projects that will go to zero. Everyone knows that. But some artists will succeed and come out at the other end. I hope to be one of them. ”
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