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[[Dapper Labs]] developed the Flow proof-of-stake blockchain.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|date=2021-03-11|title=A guide to the NFT craze|url=https://www.engadget.com/nft-explainer-digital-art-collectibles-blockchain-environment-business-investment-cryptocurrency-153023551.html|url-status=live|access-date=2021-03-17|website=Engadget|language=en-US}}</ref> Using it, in partnership with the [[NBA]], they launched a beta version of their NBA TopShot collectible and tradable NFT-based app in the first half of 2020, which they had been working on since 2018.<ref name="Shieber 2020">{{Cite web |last=Shieber |first=Jonathan |date=27 May 2020 |title=CryptoKitties developer launches NBA TopShot, a new blockchain-based collectible collab with the NBA – TechCrunch |url=https://social.techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/cryptokitties-developer-launches-nba-top-shot-a-new-blockchain-based-collectible-collab-with-the-nba/ |access-date=4 March 2021 |website=TechCrunch}}</ref> It sells tokens in packs that they say contain multimedia and data smashed together. On October 1, 2020, it was announced that they had exited the beta and opened to all fans. As of February 28, 2021, Dapper Labs was reporting over $230 million in gross sales in the app.<ref name="Young 2021">{{Cite web |last=Young |first=Jabari |date=28 February 2021 |title=People have spent more than $230 million buying and trading digital collectibles of NBA highlights |url=https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/28/230-million-dollars-spent-on-nba-top-shot.html |access-date=4 March 2021 |website=CNBC}}</ref>
[[Dapper Labs]] developed the Flow proof-of-stake blockchain.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|date=2021-03-11|title=A guide to the NFT craze|url=https://www.engadget.com/nft-explainer-digital-art-collectibles-blockchain-environment-business-investment-cryptocurrency-153023551.html|url-status=live|access-date=2021-03-17|website=Engadget|language=en-US}}</ref> Using it, in partnership with the [[NBA]], they launched a beta version of their NBA TopShot collectible and tradable NFT-based app in the first half of 2020, which they had been working on since 2018.<ref name="Shieber 2020">{{Cite web |last=Shieber |first=Jonathan |date=27 May 2020 |title=CryptoKitties developer launches NBA TopShot, a new blockchain-based collectible collab with the NBA – TechCrunch |url=https://social.techcrunch.com/2020/05/27/cryptokitties-developer-launches-nba-top-shot-a-new-blockchain-based-collectible-collab-with-the-nba/ |access-date=4 March 2021 |website=TechCrunch}}</ref> It sells tokens in packs that they say contain multimedia and data smashed together. On October 1, 2020, it was announced that they had exited the beta and opened to all fans. As of February 28, 2021, Dapper Labs was reporting over $230 million in gross sales in the app.<ref name="Young 2021">{{Cite web |last=Young |first=Jabari |date=28 February 2021 |title=People have spent more than $230 million buying and trading digital collectibles of NBA highlights |url=https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/28/230-million-dollars-spent-on-nba-top-shot.html |access-date=4 March 2021 |website=CNBC}}</ref>

Decentraland is an NFT project that you can buy and sell virtual real estate. Each plot of land on Decentraland is a unique NFT that can be purchased using [[Ethereum]] or [[Bitcoin Cash]]. Some plots are located in the universe, some are nearer to roads, some are big and some are small.<ref name="Forbes 2 2021-02-28">{{cite news |url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/cathyhackl/2021/02/28/non-fungible-tokens-101-a-primer-on-nfts-for-brands--business-professionals/|title=Non-Fungible Tokens 101: A Primer On NFTs For Brands And Business Professionals |work=[[Forbes]] |date=2021-02-28 |accessdate=2021-03-24 }}</ref>


=== Valuable art ===
=== Valuable art ===

Revision as of 17:28, 25 March 2021

For other uses, see NFT (disambiguation).
File:Hashmask 15753.jpg
This image, Hashmask[a] 15753 (1 of 16,384) by "Suum Cuique Labs GmbH", sold with an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain.

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data on a digital ledger called a blockchain, where each NFT can represent a unique digital item, and thus they are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as art, audio, videos, items in video games and other forms of creative work. While the digital files themselves are infinitely reproducible, the NFTs representing them are tracked on their underlying blockchains and provide buyers with proof of ownership.[1] Blockchains such as Ethereum, and Flow each have their own token standards to define their use of NFTs.

NFTs can be used to commodify digital creations, such as digital art, video game items, and music files. Access to any copy of the original file, however, is not restricted to the owner of the token. The first NFTs were Ethereum-based and appeared around 2015. Increased interest in the market for NFTs has resulted in increased speculation, as the same investors who had previously speculated on cryptocurrencies began trading NFTs at greatly increasing volumes.[citation needed]

NFTs mostly run on a proof-of-work blockchain, which is less energy efficient than a proof-of-stake blockchain. This has resulted in some criticism of the carbon footprint for NFT transactions.

Description

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a blockchain (a digital ledger) which can represent a unique digital item like art.[1] An NFT is a cryptographic token, but unlike cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and many network or utility tokens,[b] NFTs are not mutually interchangeable, i.e. not fungible.[2] An NFT is created by uploading a file, such as an artwork, to an NFT auction market, such as KnownOrigin, Rarible, or OpenSea.[3] This creates a copy of the file recorded on the digital ledger as an NFT, which can be bought with cryptocurrency and resold. Although an artist can sell an NFT representing a work, the artist can still retain the copyright to the work and create more NFTs of the same work.[4][5] The buyer of the NFT does not gain exclusive access to the work,[6] nor does the buyer gain possession of the "original" digital file.[7] A person who uploads a certain work as an NFT does not have to prove that they are the original artist,[8] and there have been numerous cases where art was used for NFTs without the creator's permission.[9]

Uses

NFT can be used to cause artificial scarcity of a digital creative work by making only one NFT of that work with a unique signature.[10] NFTs of artworks are therefore similar to autographed items.[11] The unique identity and ownership of an NFT is verifiable via the blockchain ledger. NFTs have metadata that is processed through a cryptographic hash function.[12] NFTs are also used to create the possibility of asset interoperability across multiple platforms.[citation needed]

Digital Art

Digital art was an early use case for NFTs, because of the ability of blockchain technology to assure the unique signature and ownership of NFTs.[13] Digital artwork by Beeple sold for US$69.3 million in 2021.[14] Christie’s made news in the auction industry by selling Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days for that sum.[15]

Collectibles

NFTs can represent collectibles like card collections but in a digital format. In February 2021, a Lebron James slam dunk NFT card on the NBA Top Shot platform sold for $208,000.[16]

Games

NFTs can also be used to represent in-game assets which are controlled by the user instead of the game developer. NFTs allow assets to be traded on third-party marketplaces without permission from the game developer.[17] In February 2021, Axie Infinity recorded a sale of $1.5 million for digital land titles in a single sale.[18]

Standards in blockchains

Specific token standards have been created to support the use of a blockchain in gaming. These include the Ethereum ERC-721 standard of CryptoKitties, and the more recent ERC-1155 standard.[19] Token standards also exist on other blockchains that support NFT like Bitcoin Cash and Flow.[20]

Ethereum

ERC-721 was the first standard for representing non-fungible digital assets on the Ethereum blockchain. ERC-721 is an inheritable Solidity smart contract standard, meaning that developers can easily create new ERC-721-compliant contracts by importing it from the OpenZeppelin library.

ERC-1155 brings the idea of "semi-fungibility" to the NFT world, as well as providing a superset of ERC-721 functionality (meaning that an ERC-721 asset could be built using ERC-1155).

Bitcoin Cash

The Simple Ledger Protocol (SLP) can be used to support non-fungible tokens by minting a non-divisible token supply of 1 without a minting baton, called a simple NFT.

NFT1 was introduced onto the Bitcoin Cash blockchain in 2019 as part of the SLP token structure. The specification codifies a more capable type of NFT that allows grouping of many NFTs together.

Flow

On the Flow blockchain, created by the team behind Cryptokitties, the Cadence programming language represents each NFT as a resource object that users store in their accounts. Resources have important ownership rules that are enforced by the type system. They can only have one owner, cannot be copied, and cannot be accidentally or maliciously lost or duplicated. These protections ensure that owners know that their NFT is safe and can represent an asset that has real value.

History

Early history

In 2014, the Counterparty protocol was released as an additional "colored-coin" layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain, making use of metadata in the Bitcoin ledger to create a new ledger. In November 2014 Rob Myers' released 100 (fungible) units of a non-divisible currency titled MYSOUL on both Counterparty[21][unreliable source?] and Dogeparty (a Counterparty clone built on top of Dogecoin), which could be considered artistic expression.[22] It appears that, at launch, the Counterparty protocol spec[23][unreliable source?] enabled the minting of a colored coin with a single, non-divisible unit. Such a single-unit coin could be loosely classify as a pointer NFT to some off-chain asset and would have theoretically been exchange-tradable as well, but no evidence that this minting occurred in this timeframe has yet surfaced.

The first known true NFTs were released as part of Etheria, a 33-by-33 3D map of 457 purchasable and tradable hexagonal tiles upon which small structures can be built with Lego-like bricks. Version 1.0, with internal trading mechanisms that appear to be non-functional, was deployed to the Ethereum main-net on October 21st, 2015. Version 1.1, released on Oct 29th, scrapped these internal trading functions entirely in favor of a two-line "setOwner" function executable only by the current tile owner.[24][unreliable source?] This change enabled external trading and thus made the tiles exchange-tradable though exchanges did not yet exist. Two days later on October 31st, Etheria version 1.2 was deployed with bugfixes such as preventing money from being swallowed when a transaction attempts to buy an already-owned tile from the contract. This version was presented at Devcon 1, the Ethereum Foundation's first fully public conference, by Etheria's creator Cyrus Adkisson on November 13, 2015 in London, features the first tradable blockchain user-generated content and is considered "official" by the creator.

While the Etheria project was noted by the developer community at its launch, almost all tiles went unpurchased for more than 5 years, until 2021, when strong interest in NFTs began a community-wide search for NFTs of note. On March 13, 2021, the remaining 359 tiles of the "official" Etheria 1.2 contract were purchased from the blockchain. The next day, the search led buyers to Version 1.1, and all its remaining 409 tiles were also snapped up by buyers speculating that it represents the first-ever exchange-tradable NFT smart contract, despite its creator's insistence that v1.2 is "official".

NFT projects

In June 2017, CryptoPunks were released on the Ethereum blockchain by American studio Larva Labs, a two-person team consisting of Matt Hall and John Watkinson.[10][25][26] Then, MoonCatRescue became the third non-fungible token project, which flew under the radar, but eventually took off on March 12, 2021. In late 2017 another project called CryptoKitties was released and went viral[27][28] and subsequently raised a $12.5 million investment.[29]

In 2018, RareBits, an NFT marketplace and exchange, raised a $6 million investment.[30] Gamedex, a collectible cards game platform made possible by NFTs, raised a $800,000 seed round.[31] Decentraland, a blockchain-based virtual world, raised $26 million in an initial coin offering,[32] and had a $20 million internal economy as of September 2018.[33]

As of 2019, Nike holds a patent for its blockchain-based NFT-sneakers called ‘CryptoKicks’.[34]

Dapper Labs developed the Flow proof-of-stake blockchain.[35] Using it, in partnership with the NBA, they launched a beta version of their NBA TopShot collectible and tradable NFT-based app in the first half of 2020, which they had been working on since 2018.[36] It sells tokens in packs that they say contain multimedia and data smashed together. On October 1, 2020, it was announced that they had exited the beta and opened to all fans. As of February 28, 2021, Dapper Labs was reporting over $230 million in gross sales in the app.[37]

Valuable art

In February 2021, the musician Grimes sold around $6 million worth of tokens representing digital art on Nifty Gateway.[38] Later in February of 2021, an NFT representing the meme animation Nyan Cat was sold in an internet marketplace for just under US$600,000.[39]

The American digital artist Beeple's work Everydays: The First 5000 Days was the first NFT of an artwork to be listed at prominent auction house Christie's and sold for 69.3 million USD on 11 March 2021.[40][41] The day before the auction, Beeple said, "I actually do think there will be a bubble, to be quite honest. And I think we could be in that bubble right now."[42] The speculative market for NFTs soared in the year leading up to early 2021 when the same investors who had speculated on cryptocurrencies traded greatly increasing volumes of NFTs.[43]

In a race for publicity, the first full album represented by an NFT to enter auction was Whale Shark by Canadian electronic artist Clarian, which was released on March 4, 2021.[44] Kings of Leon's album When You See Yourself, released on March 5, 2021, had been planned to be the first musical album sold with NFT tokens.[45][46]

Carbon emissions

NFT purchases and sales have become enmeshed in a growing controversy regarding the high energy use associated with blockchain transactions. In recent years, there have been a number of web articles[47][48] and academic reports citing high electricity usage associated with the Proof of Work validation process used on the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.[49][50] Annual greenhouse gas emission estimates from these studies vary, depending on the level of renewable energy used, but can rise into the hundreds of megatons, and are comparable to those of a country like Sweden.[51] A principal cause of these high energy requirements is the Proof of Work process used to validate blockchain transactions, which can include NFT purchases and sales. However, ethereum.org notes that these validation cycles consume energy at a rate that is largely independent of the level of NFT activity.[52] 

In response to these sustainability concerns, the Ethereum Foundation has been moving to a less energy-intensive Proof of Stake type validation protocol, which it predicts will use less than 1% of the energy currently used by the Proof of Work process.[53] This transition is expected to be completed by 2022.[54] In the interim, some NFT art sites now allow the option of buying carbon offsets when making NFT purchases or contributing a percentage of revenue to offset programs.

Some more modern NFT technologies, like Flow, already use proof-of-stake and can have much less energy usage. Cryptokitties has plans to migrate from Ethereum to Flow.[35]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ A Hashmask is a collectible piece of digital art put together by an international group of artists in the organization Suum Cuique Labs of Switzerland.
  2. ^ Network tokens are used to identify and validate payments over card networks, made with a specific merchant. Utility tokens are a type of cryptocurrency that represent access or discount to a product or service.

References

  1. ^ a b Dean, Sam (March 11, 2021). "$69 million for digital art? The NFT craze, explained". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  2. ^ "WTF Is an NFT, Anyway? And Should I Care?". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2021-03-13.
  3. ^ Allyn, Bobby (March 5, 2021). "What's An NFT? And Why Are People Paying Millions To Buy Them?". NPR. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  4. ^ Salmon, Felix (March 12, 2021). "How to exhibit your very own $69 million Beeple". Axios. Retrieved March 13, 2021.
  5. ^ Clark, Mitchell (March 11, 2021). "NFTs, explained". The Verge. Retrieved March 11, 2021.
  6. ^ Thaddeus-Johns, Josie (March 11, 2021). "What Are NFTs, Anyway? One Just Sold for $69 Million". The New York Times. Retrieved March 13, 2021.
  7. ^ "NFT blockchain drives surge in digital art auctions". BBC. March 3, 2021. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  8. ^ Debré, Elena; Mak, Aaron (March 11, 2021). "How in the World Did a "Digital Artwork" Sell for $69 Million at Christie's?". Slate. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  9. ^ Schreier, Jason (March 9, 2021). "Gaming Crypto-Artists Court Controversy While Cashing in on NFTs". Bloomberg. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  10. ^ a b Gemmell, Katharine (March 8, 2021). "Should You Buy a Bitcoin-Inspired Image of Lindsay Lohan?". Bloomberg. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  11. ^ Peters, Jay (2021-03-05). "Please do not give billionaire Jack Dorsey money for his tweet". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-03-12.
  12. ^ "Want to Buy an NFT? Here's What to Know". The Wall Street Journal. March 13, 2021. Retrieved March 14, 2021.
  13. ^ Patterson, Dan (March 4, 2021). "Blockchain company buys and burns Banksy artwork to turn it into a digital original". CBS News. Retrieved March 17, 2021.
  14. ^ Kastrenakes, Jacob (2021-03-11). "Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2021-03-21. Retrieved 2021-03-21.
  15. ^ "How Has the Media Covered Beeple and NFTs?". Auction Daily. Retrieved 2021-03-17.
  16. ^ "How a 10-second video clip sold for $6.6 million". Reuters. 2021-03-01. Retrieved 2021-03-22.
  17. ^ Quiroz-Gutierrez, Marco (22 March 2021). "NFTs Are Spurring a Digital Land Grab—in Videogame Worlds". Wall Street Journal.
  18. ^ Cuen, Leigh (17 February 2021). "People Are Spending Millions on JPEGs, Tweets, And Other Crypto Collectibles". Vice. Retrieved 22 March 2021.
  19. ^ Volpicelli, Gian (24 February 2021). "The bitcoin elite are spending millions on collectable memes". Wired UK.
  20. ^ "Uniswap UNI Token was "Shining Star" of DeFi this Past Week, while Ethereum based NFTs Rising in Popularity". CrowdFund Insider. 2021-03-07. Retrieved 2021-03-10.
  21. ^ "Block #330949". xchain.io. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  22. ^ "Kenny Schachter Gets Sucked Into the Surreal NFT Art Vortex... and Mints a Fortune Overnight". Artnet News. 2021-02-24. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  23. ^ "Counterwallet: Create Token | Counterparty". 2015-01-27. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  24. ^ "cyrusadkisson/etheria". GitHub. Retrieved 2021-03-18.
  25. ^ "This ethereum-based project could change how we think about digital art". Mashable.com. Retrieved 2017-06-16.
  26. ^ Chevet, Sylve (2018-05-10). "Blockchain Technology and Non-Fungible Tokens: Reshaping Value Chains in Creative Industries". Rochester, NY. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  27. ^ Wong, Joon Ian. "CryptoKitties is jamming up the ethereum network". Quartz. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
  28. ^ "CryptoKitties Mania Overwhelms Ethereum Network's Processing". Bloomberg.com. 2017-12-04. Retrieved 2018-05-10.
  29. ^ "CryptoKitties raises $12M from Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2018-05-07.
  30. ^ "Crypto-collectibles and Kitties marketplace Rare Bits raises $6M – TechCrunch". techcrunch.com. Retrieved 2018-05-07.
  31. ^ "Blockchain startup Gamedex raises $0.8 million seed round to build platform for digital collectible card games like Pokemon – TechStartups". techstartups.com. Retrieved 2018-05-07.
  32. ^ Russo, Camilla (2018-06-12). "Making a Killing in Virtual Real Estate". Bloomberg. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  33. ^ Hankin, Aaron (2018-09-04). "People are making more than 500% buying property that doesn't actually exist". MarketWatch. Retrieved 2018-09-05.
  34. ^ Beedham, Matthew (2019-12-10). "Nike now holds patent for blockchain-based sneakers called 'CryptoKicks'". Hard Fork | The Next Web. Retrieved 2020-12-23.
  35. ^ a b "A guide to the NFT craze". Engadget. 2021-03-11. Retrieved 2021-03-17.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  36. ^ Shieber, Jonathan (27 May 2020). "CryptoKitties developer launches NBA TopShot, a new blockchain-based collectible collab with the NBA – TechCrunch". TechCrunch. Retrieved 4 March 2021.
  37. ^ Young, Jabari (28 February 2021). "People have spent more than $230 million buying and trading digital collectibles of NBA highlights". CNBC. Retrieved 4 March 2021.
  38. ^ Kastrenakes, Jacob (2021-03-01). "Grimes sold $6 million worth of digital art as NFTs". The Verge. Retrieved 2021-03-04.
  39. ^ "Why an Animated Flying Cat With a Pop-Tart Body Sold for Almost $600,000". NY Times. 2021-02-25. Archived from the original on 2021-03-04. Retrieved 2021-02-28.
  40. ^ https://www.christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Beeple-is-first-purely-digital-artwork-NFT-to-come-to-auction-11510-7.aspx?sc_lang=en&lid=1
  41. ^ "Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie's". NY Times. 2021-02-25. Retrieved 2021-02-25.
  42. ^ "What are NFTs and why are some worth millions?". BBC. March 12, 2021. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  43. ^ Thaddeus-Johns, Josie (February 24, 2021). "Beeple Brings Crypto to Christie's". The New York Times. Retrieved March 12, 2021.
  44. ^ Robin Murray (March 5, 2021) Wait. Did Clarian Beat Kings Of Leon's NFT Record? Clash Magazine.
  45. ^ Samantha Hissong (March 3, 2021). "Kings of Leon Will Be the First Band to Release an Album as an NFT". Rolling Stone.
  46. ^ "NFT meaning explained as Kings of Leon offer music industry first". Newsweek. 2021-03-05. Retrieved 2021-03-09.
  47. ^ Barber, Gregory (March 8, 2021). "NFTs Are Hot. So Is Their Effect on the Earth's Climate". Wired. Retrieved 17 March 2021.
  48. ^ "Ethereum Energy Consumption Index". Digiconomist. Retrieved 17 March 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  49. ^ Stoll, Christian; et al. (2019). "The Carbon Footprint of Bitcoin". Joule. 3: 1647–1661. doi:10.1016/j.joule.2019.05.012.
  50. ^ "Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index". Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. University of Cambridge, Judge Business School. Retrieved March 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  51. ^ "Comparisons". Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. University of Cambridge, Judge Business School. Retrieved March 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  52. ^ "Non-fungible tokens (NFT)". ethereum.org. Retrieved March 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  53. ^ "Ethereum Plans to Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption by 99 Percent". IEEE Spectrum. Retrieved March 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  54. ^ "Non-fungible tokens (NFT)". ethereum.org. Retrieved March 17, 2021.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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