Over the past few months, I started hearing about NFTs. NFT stands for "non-fungible token" and right now it's the biggest topic within art communities across the internet. Basically it's a unique one of a kind digital collectible that can be represented as a piece of artwork, a photograph, digital outfits for an avatar, etc. At first, I didn’t see the point. But my perspective changed when I understood that if you own an NFT, that's it. You're the owner and you can resell it just like any piece of art.
About a month ago, I started assisting visual artist, Gabriel Gimenez. He successfully launched a series on Nifty Gateway which is the largest and most popular platform for NFT at the moment.
He gave me an explanation about how NFTs work and why they're so significant in the art world.
There's so many benefits to this for artists of all kinds, including royalties being paid to artists after every sale, retaining the credit that can be traced back to the original artist through the blockchain, and more people finally taking digital art more seriously. I was getting all sorts of ideas for it in a way that made so much sense for my type of work. I was going to post a whole series of work on OpenSea, which is an open platform for anyone to post their NFT content. But then, I stumbled onto an article that explained the problem behind this.
Basically the process of mining NFTs takes up an insane amount of energy. After realizing just how harmful this was for the planet, I held back all my efforts to create my first NFT launch. And every time I see one of my favorite artists release one, it kinda breaks my heart a little bit. I have ultimately decided to postpone any of my NFT releases until there's an alternative—and they're working on it. But this whole NFT thing is still so new and imperfect. I have such a huge love for digital art because of it's accessibility and open distribution. I don't think art should be the reason we speed up our carbon footprint. It just doesn't make sense to me. This whole NFT thing is cool and it'll be a large part of our future for sure. But for now, it still needs a few more tweaks.
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