In the spring of 2021, NFT has become the most sought-after investment.

Artists are the most important source of artworks, but the people that artworks pass through in the circulation process are the key factors that determine the value of artworks.

In the spring of 2021, NFT has become the most sought-after investment.

NFT (non-fungible token), the Chinese name is a non-homogeneous token, a digital asset verified by blockchain technology. Its most understandable nickname is digital artwork.

A video clip of LeBron James shooting a Lakers game was made into an NFT and sold for $100,000.

American rock band Kings of Leon's new album "When You See Yourself" is sold in the form of NFT, earning more than $2 million.

The world's first tweet, sold for $2.916 million.

The tweet read "Just set up my twitter" and was posted by the Twitter CEO

Artist Beeple has been creating one picture a day since 2007, and finally stitched 5,000 pictures into a 316MB JPG file. This work "Everydays: The First 5000 Days", which took 14 years to create, was sold as an NFT at Christie's for $69.34 million.

Fintech financing in Southeast Asia in 2021 has reached US$3.5 billion: According to news from November 10, a report released by United Overseas Bank of Singapore, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Singapore Fintech Association on Wednesday showed that the fintech financing in Southeast Asia in the first nine months of this year It has more than tripled from last year to a record $3.5 billion. A total of 167 deals were involved, with 13 super rounds of more than $100 million contributing $2 billion. The payments sector attracted the most funds, followed by Tech and Crypto. Singapore accounted for nearly half of the region's funding with $1.6 billion, including six super rounds totaling $972 million. It was followed by Indonesia ($904 million) and Vietnam ($375 million). (Reuters) [2021/11/10 21:40:09]

"Everydays: The First 5000 Days" work

What exactly is NFT, we have to start with traditional artworks.

How much is the most expensive artwork in the world worth?

In terms of Chinese painting, Qi Baishi's "Landscape Twelve Screens" was sold for 931.5 million yuan in 2017.

Report: The scale of China's national blockchain industry will reach 2.78 billion yuan in 2020, with a growth rate of 33.7%: According to news on July 14, recently, CCID Consulting Digital Economy Industry Research Center released the "2020-2021 China Blockchain Industry Development Research Annual Report", which analyzes the development of the global and Chinese blockchain industry in 2020, and gives a judgment on the trend of China's blockchain industry in the next two years. Saidi pointed out that in 2020, under the influence of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, the growth rate of the global blockchain industry will slow down significantly, and the overall industry size will reach 2.81 billion US dollars. In China, the scale of the national blockchain industry will reach 2.78 billion yuan in 2020, with a growth rate of 33.7%, exceeding the growth rate of the global blockchain industry and becoming one of the countries with the greatest development potential in the global blockchain industry. China's non-digital currency blockchain enterprises have a large base and strong innovation, and most of these enterprises use the alliance chain as the underlying structure, which is relatively mature in technology. However, the penetration rate of industry-end users under the industry chain needs to be improved. With the further increase in the demand for quality and efficiency improvement in the manufacturing industry, it is expected that in the future, the demand for industry-end users to deploy blockchain solutions will gradually increase, and the market space will be further enlarged. [2021/7/14 0:50:26]

Masterpieces by Willem de Kooning, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin and other painters have fetched more than $100 million at auction.

Bloomberg: Bitcoin hits biggest one-day drop since March 2020: On January 4th, Bitcoin experienced shocks after breaking through the high of $34,000 at the beginning of the new year. As of 10:41 a.m. London time, the price of bitcoin was $29,168, a one-day drop of 13%. On "Black Thursday" in March 2020, Bitcoin's one-day drop was 17%. Bloomberg said that it is difficult to find the direct cause of the latest violent fluctuations. At the time of writing, the price of Bitcoin has rebounded, according to CoinGecko data, it is 29987.36 US dollars, an increase of 2.5% in an hour. [2021/1/4 16:25:40]

Leonardo da Vinci's painting "Salvator Mundi" sold for $450.3 million at Christie's auction house in 2017, making it the most expensive work of art in the world.

Salvator Mundi painting

The painting "Salvator Mundi" has been publicly traded five times:

The first was sold at Sotheby's in 1958 for £45;

IDC: China's distributed storage market will reach US$2.46 billion by 2024: A few days ago, IDC released the survey data of China's enterprise storage market in the first quarter of 2020. The overall shipment of China's external storage market was 34,000 sets, a year-on-year decrease of 18.4% , with sales of 4.81 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 7.9%.

IDC believes that due to the impact of the new crown epidemic, the storage demand of some industries has shrunk, resulting in a short-term decline in the Chinese storage market. However, as the epidemic is effectively controlled, the Chinese storage market will gradually resume growth. The epidemic has prompted organizations to accelerate the adoption of technologies and IT delivery models that help optimize IT infrastructure resources. Internet healthcare, digital government, remote office, digital education, and unmanned sales have shown stronger demand, increasing demand for IT infrastructure. purchases, thereby leading to growth in the storage market.

Overall, IDC predicts that China's storage market will maintain positive growth throughout 2020. From the perspective of market segments, distributed storage and flash storage have become the main drivers of market growth. Among them, distributed storage has become the mainstream storage form supporting cloud, big data, artificial intelligence and other emerging workloads. By 2024, the scale of China's distributed storage market will reach 2.46 billion US dollars, and all-flash storage is driven by the real-time data demand of enterprises to maintain rapid growth. It is predicted that the market growth rate in 2020 will reach 40%. (World Wide Web) [2020/6/17]

The second was at a collector's estate sale in Louisiana, USA, for less than $10,000;

Dynamics | The global blockchain technology market will exceed US$16 billion by 2024: According to news from Cointelegraph on September 21, a recent report by Global Market Insights, Inc, a global market research and strategic consulting firm, estimated that by 2024, the global The blockchain technology market size will exceed $16 billion. According to the analysis, the key factor driving the growth of the global blockchain technology market will primarily be the increasing adoption of blockchain by financial enterprises. Financial institutions will purportedly adopt blockchain because of its ability to improve the efficiency of internal processes and reduce operational costs in areas such as trade finance, documentation and know-your-customer. [2019/9/22]

The third transaction occurred in 2013, and the resale price reached 80 million US dollars;

The fourth transaction took place in the same year, when a Russian rich man took over "Savior Mundi" for $127.5 million;

The fifth time is the highest price in history in 2017.

From 45 pounds to 450.3 million US dollars, among the 5 historical transactions of "Savior", the most critical is the third transaction with the largest increase.

Previously, the painting "Salvator Mundi" was mistaken for the work of Leonardo da Vinci's disciples because it was covered with multiple layers of oil paint. Of course, the price of imitation products will not be high.

At the end of 2010, a team of international experts, using infrared reflection imaging technology, found that there were traces of modification on Jesus' thumb in the painting-the imitation will not have traces of modification, only the original manuscript will.

The left is the real shot of the painting, and the right is the infrared reflection imaging

As a result, "Salvator Mundi" was confirmed as the authentic work of Da Vinci, and the price skyrocketed accordingly.

Traditional works of art represented by "Savior Mundi" have long been troubled by the problem of counterfeiting. Because it is profitable, the forgery and identification of artworks has become a science.

In addition, there are several major difficulties in investing in traditional artworks: different temperature and humidity environments will affect the physical artwork. Insurance costs, repair costs, shipping costs are all costs.

Customs duties and import value-added tax are required to be paid for the entry of artworks, so many artworks have been stored in warehouses in free ports such as Hong Kong and Switzerland for a long time.

The combination of various reasons has led to a small audience in the art investment market, a small transaction volume, and long-term poor liquidity.

Things are changing with the development of blockchain technology.

For example, after being certified by a real estate exchange, we can show ownership of the real estate under our name through the real estate certificate.

And NFT is to prove that you own the ownership of an item through the immutable blockchain technology.

The difference is that the certification of real estate certificates is carried out by government departments, while the certification of NFT is jointly certified by everyone on the blockchain. The former has a center, and the latter is decentralized.

The operation of NFT is not complicated. If a painter wants to sell his work, he can upload the work to a platform such as OpenSea (similar to a real estate exchange), authenticate it through the blockchain, and convert it into an NFT (similar to a real estate certificate).

At present, NFT already supports many file formats, such as image files (JPG, PNG, GIF), music files (MP3), and videos.

Compared with traditional works of art, NFT does not need to identify the authenticity, and as a digital asset, it also reduces maintenance costs, so it is ushering in rapid development. For a time, everything can be NFT.

Quotations of various NFTs on the OpenSea platform

According to statistics, in the first three months of this year, the total transaction volume of the NFT market exceeded US$1.5 billion, a month-on-month increase of more than 2627%.

To keep up with the times, we need to understand NFTs, but not necessarily participate.

Why do you say that?

Buffett once divided assets into three categories:

The first category is currency-based assets. Such as bonds and bank deposits, which are characterized by extremely low volatility (safety) and clear yields, but may lose purchasing power in the long run.

The second category is assets that cannot produce anything. The typical representative is gold. Hens can lay eggs, and cows can produce milk, but a kilogram of gold held for 10,000 years is still only one kilogram of gold. The income from buying this asset can only come from the next higher price taker.

The third category is productive assets. Including businesses, real estate, farms, etc. Enterprises produce products, houses are for people to live in, and farms produce food. They can continue to provide products or services, and they will always be needed by people.

And their income does not depend on the quotation of the receiver, but only on the ability of "milk production".

If NFT is classified, it is obviously the second type of asset: a painting will always be a painting, and another small painting will not be born.

Therefore, no matter how high the price of NFT is, it is just out of each other's pockets.

If you have to participate, what should you do?

Economist Keynes once put forward the "beauty pageant theory":

In a beauty pageant where many beauties participate, if you guess the winner, you can win a big prize.

If you want to win a prize, you can't choose the beauty you think is the most beautiful as the champion (even if she looks like the girl of your dreams), but you should choose the beauty that everyone will choose as the champion.

Back to NFT, if you want to make a profit, you can’t buy the product you are optimistic about, but you should choose the product that everyone is optimistic about, even if you are not optimistic about it.

For example, in 1961, the artist Piero Manzoni put his excrement into a can, and the label of the can read "artist's shit, fresh storage, net weight 30 grams" in three languages: English, French and Italian. .

Manzoni and his "Artist Shit"

Manzoni decided to sell the cans for an equal weight of gold (about $37 at the time, about 10,000 yuan in today's gold prices), and when the price of gold fluctuated, so did the price of the cans.

Is anyone buying this?

In 2005 and 2007, it fetched RMB 1.1 million and 1.5 million respectively, more than 100 times the price of equivalent gold.

If there are still people who are willing to pay a higher price, then "Artist Shit" is a good investment object.

If not, then the collector who spent 1.5 million to buy it will become the unlucky guy in the game of drumming and passing flowers.

Therefore, Keynes's "beauty pageant theory" is also known as the "biggest fool theory": even if an item is worthless, you are willing to pay a high price because you expect a bigger fool to pay a higher price buy it. The key is to judge whether there is a bigger fool than yourself, if not, then you are the biggest fool.

In the long run, only productive assets create wealth.

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