Blockchain Powered Marketplace For Artwork (#GotBitcoin?)

NFTs have begun surfacing as artwork, giving the tokenholder ownership over the art. Blockchain Powered Marketplace For Artwork (#GotBitcoin?)

Each artwork on the SuperRare is authentically created by an artist in the network. They are then backed by Ethereum blockchain to verify the origin and trace the entire history of the piece.

The art piece was tokenized as a non-fungible ERC-721 token, a crypto-collectible digital item that can either be traded or held as long term investment, since it’s a token that is as unique as the artwork itself. Artists can choose to either put their creations up for an auction or sell at a set price.

Updated: 9-19-2020

Bitcoin-Based Artwork Smashes Records, Sells For $100K

Many artists work their entire lives and never see their work sold for this kind of price tag.

“Right Place & Right Time,” a digital art piece based on Bitcoin’s (BTC) fluctuating price action, has sold for more than $100,000.

“The Master NFT of Right Place & Right Time was sold to TokenAngels for $101,593. — but happy to call it $100,000,” Matt Kane, the artwork’s creator, told Cointelegraph on Friday.

NFT stands for nonfungible token — a unique digital asset that does not synonymously value others like it. “Right Place & Right Time” is an NFT art piece showing a creatively designed image of Bitcoin’s logo. The patterns and overall look, however, change along with Bitcoin’s price action.

Kane said he cannot remember when he actually began creating the art piece. “I’ve lost track of time in creating it,” he said.

“My artwork always takes however much or little time that the work demands. The original digital painting was made last November and then I began preparing it to become a programmable artwork on Async Art in January. There’s been countless tweaks and preparations to perfect it’s homecoming to Volatility.art.”

Many artists put their masterpieces on the blockchain via Async Art, while Volatility.art is a place viewers can see Bitcoin art formed from its daily price action.

“Right Place & Right Time” stands as a unique piece. The master NFT sold for $100,000. This master NFT, however, will create 210 different NFT artworks based on Bitcoin’s price action and the subsequent patterns that pop up on the master art piece.

“Each NFT will be created by the original master NFT,” Kane explained. “The compositions are created using an algorithm I wrote which visualize a single day in Bitcoin price volatility,” he noted. “I’ll maintain some creative influence, altering colors and other design elements as the project matures over time,” he said, adding: “And of course I curate which days are minted.”

When each of the 210 pieces are purchased, the master NFT owner receives 21% of each sale, Kane explained. “The purchasers of these 210 will [also] have the option to buy a print counterpart of their NFT art,” Kane added.

The 210 and 21% numbers give tribute to the Bitcoin’s maximum supply — 21 million coins.

The crypto and blockchain space has seen its art scene rise as of late, as a number of various art-related initiatives have popped up across the industry.

Updated: 10-4-2020

Ikohaus Gallery: We Create In A Non Physical Space And It Is In The Midst Of This Nexus That We Relate To Each Other.

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Updated: 5-31-2020

Crypto Artist Sold His “I Can’t Breathe” Art Piece For Crypto On A Blockchain-Backed Social Network

I Can’t Breathe

Art Piece Titled “I Can’t Breathe” Sold For Crypto At Auction

Osinachi, a self-taught Nigerian digital and crypto artist, has sold his latest “I Can’t Breathe” digital art piece on May 31 for 7 Etherum (ETH), about $1,703 at press time on a blockchain art social network site SuperRare.

Funding Goes To A Cause

Osinachi’s piece reflects on the violence that unravelled in an American city of Mediapolis, and was sold in less than six hours at an auction. According to the artist, part of the proceeds will go to a notable cause. He stated that: “Part of the proceeds from this NFT will go to the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Osinachi was the first-ever Nigerian artist to showcase artworks at the Ethereal Summit in New York in 2018. He was also shortlisted for the Bridgeman Studio Award 2019.

As Cointelegraph reported previously, crypto art can be seen as an investment with just as much potential as any other cryptocurrency coins and tokens.

Updated: 6-15-2020

How An Art Collective Is Using Blockchain To Protest Police Brutality

A blockchain-centric art project is pushing the boundaries of modern art with a controversial digital display.

The DADA Art Collective, a loosely affiliated group of roughly a dozen visual artists across the globe, teamed up with the non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces OpenSea and Mintbase plus the file-storage blockchain Arweave to publish the names and faces of American police officers accused of killing unarmed black people.

The project, No Justice No Peace, was published June 6 in collaboration with crypto veteran Dennison Bertram, founder of the DappHero project.

“The collective got in touch with me,” Bertram said. “Social justice is something that I’ve always been interested in. They’d already minted and created these tokens. … It’s a fascinating demonstration of how to do social protests using blockchain technology.”

The DADA Collective’s Judy Mam said 10 artists contributed to this piece to support Black Lives Matter and police reform, with pictures of 30 officers along with their alleged crimes and case statuses.

The artists leveraged Arweave’s blockchain to create a wallet associated with each person killed, holding tokens that have data for the corresponding officers’ information.

“The private keys of the wallets that control these tokens have been destroyed. No one controls these tokens. These tokens can’t be censored, modified or taken down,” the project’s website says.

“Blockchain is itself a political statement, the ability to organize outside of government control,” Bertam said. “What about decentralizing justice or human rights or other aspects of society that are critical to the ways people live?”

And yet, this project raises tricky questions about the ethics of immutable digital records. In Europe, lawmakers have introduced a “right to be forgotten” with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Even in the United States, Mam said the artists behind this project prefer to stay anonymous because some jurisdictions limit access to evidence that might incriminate police officers.

“The police do take action against [outspoken] people,” Mam said. “These [visual pieces] are tokenized but they’re not for sale. … It was about making a statement.”

Black Lives Matter

With simple text beneath black and white photos, the message is clear. There’s scant artistic flourish in this piece.

“We don’t forget. We find out who you are,” Mam said. “Maybe someday some of these men will get a [prison] sentence. … But at least now there’s a record that is there forever, immutably, of these people and their crimes.”

The criminal justice system failed to proceed with formal charges in most of these cases, despite community efforts, according to research from Bowling Green State University. This piece is just one of many activist projects already curating public lists with such information. Howard University student and crypto aficionado Gerald Nash, who was not affiliated with the “No Justice No Peace,” said he thinks the project is interesting.

“People should take into account this isn’t an organization doing unbiased research,” Nash said of the art collective. “As a black person and someone who wants to see justice. … I see no difference between this and holding up a sign.”

Of course, “censorship resistance” is a relative term. Governments could make it difficult to access affiliated websites and keyword searches, even if the blockchain data remains unaltered. Some experts would also argue a blockchain’s immutability depends on its incentive structure and participants, which likely are not infallible. The Arweave blockchain’s distribution is still nascent, with less than 3,000 members in the project’s Discord group.

Even with these limitations, University of New Hampshire law professor Tonya Evans agreed this art project is an interesting use case – memorializing information.

“I would compare it to what news reporters do … [but] reporters have to be very thoughtful about ways to correct the record, even if that’s to add to and not take away from,” Evans said, describing American freedom of speech laws. “Code is also speech. It will be interesting to see what type of innovation emerges during this period with regards to protecting free speech.”

Updated: 10-7-2020

Crypto Art Piece Sells For $130K At Christie’s Auction House

The NFT is “a symbolic expression of Satoshi’s vision, forged out of the very code that lies at the genesis of it all.”

Christie’s auction house has announced the sale of a digital portrait of the Bitcoin code for more than $130,000.

It marks the first time a non-fungible token (NFT) was auctioned at a major auction house, and the price exceeded expectations.

According to the auction house, an unknown buyer purchased “Block 21,” comprised of a physical piece of art and an NFT representing Satoshi Nakamoto for $131,250 at Christie’s on Oct. 7 as part of its “Post-War and Contemporary Day Auction.” Bidding started at $22,000.

The artwork, created by Ben Gentilli with the Robert Alice project, is one of 40 creations in a series, and holds exactly 322,048 digits of Satoshi’s original Bitcoin (BTC) code. The series, titled “Portraits of a Mind”, shows the cryptocurrency’s 12.3 million digits of original code individually engraved and painted on 40 different circular panels stretching more than 50 meters in length.

Blockchain Powered Marketplace For Artwork (#GotBitcoin?)

Christie’s auction was for just one of the paintings in the series — “Block 21” — whose name references the scarcity of Bitcoin being capped at 21 million coins. Binance founder Changpeng Zhao and Bloq chairman Matthew Rozsak have also reportedly purchased pieces from Portraits of a Mind.

“The work is a symbolic expression of Satoshi’s vision, forged out of the very code that lies at the genesis of it all,” states the Robert Alice website. “Portraits of a Mind explores the multi-faceted identities of Satoshi Nakamoto, in turn reflecting on the nature of both identity and portraiture in a newly decentralized age.”

Until now, the most expensive piece of digital art sold at auction was Matt Kane’s NFT “Right Place & Right Time,” based on Bitcoin’s fluctuating price, which sold for $101,593 in September.

The first NFT-Real World Piece sold at Christie’s.

Estimated $12-$18k.

Guess how much it went for?

$131,250USD!

#crypto is crazy, and the real world is starting to find out. https://t.co/4ryWGSLh1F

— dclblogger.eth (@DCLBlogger) October 7, 2020