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Confusing many and enriching some, NFTs, or “Non-Fungible Tokens,” have taken over both the art and finance scenes this past year. Investors from the technology world, the finance world, and the art world alike are quickly investing large sums of money into the NFT business as it is proving to have high growth potential. Everyone wants to get into NFTs, but they do not necessarily know where to start.
An NFT is a one-of-a-kind token that represents a unique good or asset, the purchase and sale of which is documented and verified utilizing blockchain’s transparent ledger technology. Due to the ability to stamp digital authenticity as well as verify digital sales, NFT technology is rapidly opening up a new marketplace for digital art. Further, NFTs inspire a network effect as previous owners get a percentage of future sales of a given token and as most NFT collections have an active online community spanning multiple social media platforms.
Andy Valmorbida and his company, Untitled-1, are planning to use their exclusive copyright of Richard Hambleton’s original artwork in order to create an exciting new NFT collection. As an originator of street art and street art culture, Richard Hambleton was a part of the avant-garde art movement of his time. Not only is his novel, and sometimes shocking, art style a perfect fit for an NFT collection, but it is also poetic that the revolutionary artist’s work will be a part of today’s avant-garde art movement.
Recently, Damien Hirst, JR, and Jeff Koons, among others, have joined digital artists alike in creating NFTs. As an artist chooses their materials for a painting, a digital artist chooses their media. NFTs have come in the form of a moving image, video, photograph, and more. After choosing the media your NFT will be created using, an artist will then decide on which platform to host their collection. Both Damien Hirst and JR have chosen the eco-friendly platform – Heni.
While many people in the art and technology industries are excited about NFTs, there are some concerns from an environmental perspective as the NFT minting process has recently gained some negative press on this issue. This is precisely why Valmorbida and Untitled-1 plan to use carbon-neutral NFT technology for their Hambletonn NFT collection mitigating any environmental concerns.
Of course, the Hambleton NFTs will be backed by the physical works of Richard Hambleton and his reputation as a legendary artist. This will surely put the Hambleton NFT collection in a tier above other NFTs without this connection to a famous artist.
We can predict that other estates and owners of artist copyrights will follow Valmorbida in the venture of creating artist NFTs. NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain alone have reached a total volume of $7 billion in 2021 so far and the NFT market is only getting bigger.
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