Is NFT a gimmick or a real trend?

A menacing digital art investment frenzy is quietly sweeping our Internet life. So weird, but so unbelievably real: On February 19, 2021, with the hammer down of an online auction, the 35-year-old American amateur cartoonist Christopher Torres sold his 10-year-old cartoon for $580,000. In his 20-year creative career, the only SNS hit masterpiece: That's right, it is the "Rainbow Cat" we are familiar with, Nyan Cat. The buyer of this auction was an anonymous user of Foundation, a digital commodity trading and bidding platform; as the beneficiary, facing hundreds of thousands of dollars that seemed to fall from the sky, Christopher Torres almost suffocated on the spot: "I feel, as if The flood gates were opened..." The words became a prophecy. In the next month, a series of auction records with almost ridiculous amounts completely overturned our conventional understanding of "art investment": Elon Musk's current girlfriend, Canadian singer Claire Eli Ruth Butcher (Grimes), took 20 minutes to shoot 10 digital singles, the total transaction price is close to 6 million US dollars; Las Vegas house musician Justin David Blau (3LAU) is not to be outdone , picked up his degree in finance, and used a digital album to catch up on this craze—the transaction amount of 11.6 million US dollars shocked everyone; The digital paintings of "Days" fetched a transaction price of US$69.34 million at Christie's auction house - the auction transaction record for virtual artworks has been refreshed; TZ APAC CEO: Blockchain and Web 3.0 courses will become a part of higher education within a few years Important components: On May 13, Colin Miles, the new CEO of TZ APAC, predicted that in the next three to five years, blockchain and Web 3.0 courses will begin to become an integral part of higher education. Recently, TZ APAC reached a cooperation agreement with the School of Computing, National University of Singapore (NUS). Under the agreement, the Tezos institution will support the development of Nurturing Computing Excellence, a new center at the National University of Singapore. It is reported that the National University of Singapore currently provides in-depth blockchain courses for different levels from beginners to CEOs and middle managers. Other well-known universities offering blockchain courses include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Harvard University, Oxford University, Cornell University, and UC Berkeley. (Cointelegraph) [2022/5/13 3:13:41] However, this is still not the craziest. After seeing the first tweet of Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, he easily bought ether equivalent to 2.9 million US dollars (price at the time of transaction) in the form of digital assets, and we finally calmed down after witnessing everything , began to rethink a key question: Who, or what concept, is secretly driving these wild transactions? The answer is simple: NFTs. Like most hot search-zce terms that have become popular overnight, NFT (Non-Fungible Token, non-homogeneous token) has two clear characteristics: First, this concept comes from the chain circle and exists with the currency circle An unbreakable connection; second, the time node for the formation of the basic concept is longer than our impression. Equilibrium won the 12th Polkadot parachain auction: On March 20, Equilibrium announced that it won the 12th Polkadot auction and will join the Polkadot network as the 12th parachain. The project plans to launch the spot and lending markets before June. It is reported that Equilibrium is designed as a super application, which integrates the most popular DeFi use cases, provides high-leverage cross-chain lending and trading digital assets, combines order book DEX, margin trading functions and innovative currency markets, and the minimum mortgage Ask as low as 105%. [2022/3/20 14:07:15] As early as 2017, with a blockchain application called Cryptokitties becoming popular on the Ethernet, NFT, an intriguing alternative virtual currency, officially entered the public eye through the mainstream media ; To put it simply, players participating in this game can collect and breed a virtual pet named Cryptokitty through Cryptokities-although they are still regarded as virtual currency in essence, they are similar to the familiar Bitcoin and Ethereum. The biggest difference is that each Cryptokities uses the digital encryption technology of the blockchain to produce unique individual characteristics by arranging and combining various elements. To put it more bluntly, we can regard each Cryptokitty as a virtual coin that cannot be touched, and each coin has a different design, color and texture. This means that it is possible to artificially set standards and designate Cryptokitty with certain characteristics to raise prices. The reason why the transaction amount of a single Cryptokitty can soar more than 6,000 times in less than a month after its official launch in 2017 , one of the reasons is exactly this. However, in addition to making a fortune for the upstarts in the currency circle in 2017, more and more parties have realized that the real value of this blockchain application is far from being covered by a few virtual kittens. The: Metaverse "Colorful World" is officially launched today, and can be downloaded from the Apple App Store and Google Play: Golden Finance Report, Color Planet Technology (Nasdaq code: cscw hereinafter referred to as: Color Star Technology) announced today that its entertainment yuan Cosmos product "Colorful World" is officially launched today, and users around the world can log in to the Apple APP Store and Google Play to download. Mr. Lucas Capetian, CEO of Color Planet, said: "The built-in functions of Color World launched this time include social networking, business meetings, shopping malls, star classrooms, etc. All users can use these functions for free at present, and users can choose one after downloading and registering. Our favorite virtual characters can replace our activities in the colorful world." (Qilu Online) [2022/1/29 9:21:06] If in this system, it is popular to use blockchain encryption technology Internet memes, or even a masterpiece of art with a high reputation in reality, what will happen? After realizing that this kind of business has a lot to do, NFT has finally risen on the horizon of wealth and freedom, and has become one of the hottest speculative concepts in the blockchain and virtual currency circles in the first quarter of 2021. Obviously, the most direct value of NFT lies in giving "uniqueness" to those creations that are widely circulated but mediocre in nature, and then generate "artistic" and "transactional value". In fact, as early as the 1950s, along with the rising wave of consumerism, an unprecedented new wave of modern art swept over Western society irresistibly—glass bottles of Coca-Cola, cans of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup, flashy and colorful Marilyn Monroe's promotional photos, and even the concept of the dollar itself, these common commercial symbols in the West after World War II, were printed on canvas, put in frames and sent to galleries one by one, and sold at impressive prices. That's right, giving "artisticity" and "transaction value" to the creation of fast-moving consumerism is one of the outstanding representatives of the hedonic culture in the 20th century-Pop Art. Zhou Qiang of the Supreme Court: Promoting the application of emerging technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence: According to news on January 17, the National Conference of Presidents of High Courts was held in the form of a teleconference yesterday afternoon. speak. The meeting called for consolidating and improving the achievements of smart courts to create a higher level of digital justice. It is necessary to deepen the innovation of online litigation models and rules, strictly implement the online litigation rules, online mediation rules and the online operation rules of the people's courts, and deepen the construction of Internet courts. It is necessary to expand the application scenarios of information technology in the judicial field, promote the application of emerging technologies such as 5G, blockchain, and artificial intelligence, and strengthen top-level design and technical research. It is necessary to actively participate in the promotion of digital governance, explore the advantages of massive judicial big data, strengthen in-depth research and judgment of key cases in related fields, and provide decision-making reference for analysis of economic and social development trends, resolution of conflicts and disputes, and early warning of economic risks. (Beiqing.com) [2022/1/17 8:54:38] As a result, a very interesting question has surfaced: "Isn't NFT the pop art of the blockchain era?" The creativity of avant-garde art concepts has long since dried up, but as one of the most influential types of modern art in the 20th century, until today, pop art can still be seen everywhere in our real life: from movies to books, from advertising design to installation art , From fast-moving consumer goods to the Internet to the blockchain, the ghost of pop art seems to have never gone away. Why do we love pop art so much? The reason is that, from an artistic point of view, it is an out-and-out commercial product; and from a commercial point of view, it is a genuine masterpiece of art. Take Andy Warhol's representative work "Campbell's Soup Can" as an example. On the one hand, this work is collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Campbell's Soup Cans" can be purchased for less than $50,000. After all, since the 1960s, in Andy Warhol's studio "Silver Factory", the process of "manufacturing" pop art works with manual screen printing lines has already taken shape. 250 copies have been completed before and after, each of which is a genuine masterpiece of pop art. Mark Cuban disclosed his personal wallet address, holding OCEAN, RARI, gOHM, AUDIO and other Tokens: On January 15th, NBA Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban disclosed his wallet address, which contained several and Some Tokens built on Ethereum. According to EtherScan data, Tokens held by Mark Cuban include data exchange platform Ocean Protocol (OCEAN), cross-chain smart contract protocol Rarible (RARI), Olympus DAO governance token (gOHM) and music streaming blockchain Audius (AUDIO)). In addition, Mark Cuban also disclosed some of his NFTs and displayed his NFT collections on Lazy, a social encryption collection platform. These NFTs are mainly distributed on Solana, Polygon and Ethereum chains. Mark Cuban said frankly: Most of the investments I make now are not in traditional industries. Among the investments other than Shark Tank, 80% are in the field of cryptocurrencies and around cryptocurrencies. (dailyhodl)[2022/1/15 8:50:38] “Pop artists make images that are instantly recognizable to anyone who walks down Broadway—caricatures, picnic tables, men’s slacks, Celebrities, shower curtains, refrigerators, Coca-Cola bottles—all these great modern things that the Abstract Expressionists looked for and completely missed.” —Andy Warhol Catching the Wave of Consumerism, From Us Discover the "artistic quality" among the common objects around us, and through large-scale mass production, use the basic attribute of "don't care about copying at all", completely rewrite the definition of "authentic work" in traditional artistic creation, and pave the way for commercial art in the literal sense. This is pop art. However, it is a pity that Pop Art, which uses vision as the main carrier, still has a high appreciation threshold. Faced with paintings of soup cans that look like advertising posters, the first reaction of most people is still bewilderment. It can be said that there is a huge cognitive gap between "social popularity" and "public understanding" of pop art, which weakens the commercial value of pop art to some extent. But soon, keen gallery investors realized that Pop Art could copy traditional art investment routines for hype. In 1964, Andy Warhol's fanatical fan and New York performance artist Dorothy Papper raided the "Silver Factory", causing four newly completed silkscreen portraits of "Marilyn Monroe" to be pierced by bullets— — It didn’t take long for these four works to be officially sold under the name of “Shot Marilyns”, breaking the transaction price record for Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Monroe” printed portrait in one fell swoop. In this way, under the control of art investors, the original intention of creation was to eliminate "uniqueness", and the Pop Art, which allowed visual art to enter ordinary people's families from the temples of high and low, came to an end with the complete failure of the concept. "Commercial speculation for profit will inevitably completely distort the concept of art, even if the original intention is to commercialize the art form" - this is the lesson left to us by Pop Art in the 20th century. Let's turn the calendar back to the 21st century and take a look at NFT again: It is obvious that from the wave after wave of "an emoticon pack selling for millions of dollars" momentum, the current NFT, from the very beginning of the business goal, It is to send "everyday things" into the lofty traditional "art temple" and become "sky-high priced things" beyond the reach of ordinary people. In contrast, the purpose of pop art is to resist the traditional art that ordinary people can only look up to in the temples, and to ridicule those "masterpieces of art" that deviate from the original intention of creation and become the target of sky-high speculation at a price that is not so high. —Although the ending is not so ideal, we obviously cannot deny this original intention. One is to conform to the tradition, and the other is to subvert the tradition. Although the ending is the commercialization of art, the NFT that achieves the goal and the pop art that fails completely are two opposite concepts from the very beginning. However, based on this alone, are we going to deny the value of NFT? At the beginning of last month, Injective Protocol, a blockchain studio from New York, bought the work "Morons" by the British street graffiti celebrity Banksy for $95,000 and burned it, and then successfully sold the NFT of this work at 4 times the price Version. Although judging from the follow-up reports and rumors, this radical performance art is more like a farce, but countless people still regard this "physical digital" art auction as an industry symbolic event of the strong rise of NFT. However, regarding the value and future of NFT, it is obviously not enough to use a single event as a reference. Let us look at a few more familiar examples: Nowadays, whenever NFT is mentioned, many people will read Cryptokitties in the article tracing the source. Keywords - this article is no exception..

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