By Ruchika Seneviratne
It is the talk of the town as of now and quite literally a million dollar idea. Celebrities, billionaires, technology companies are all promoting NFT at the moment. But what exactly are NFT’s? How do you make money from it? These are all common questions swirling around the world right now and is causing quite the buzz and also, quite the controversy in social media apps like Twitter, Instagram, Reddit etc. So in this article, we will be discussing what exactly these NFT’s are.
What are NFT’s?
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) are digital, unique data units, that are logged and authenticated on Crypto currency blockchains like Ethereum. These NFT’s could even be images, videos and digital art etc. However, it cannot be traded like bitcoins so they work differently than crypto currencies.
NFT’s create a huge market for people to own and sell digital content and for artists, it holds a proper method of monetization for digital art. They can do something called minting in a NFT marketplace like OpenSea, SuperRare etc., which makes their work a NFT by applying something called a ‘smart contract’ on a blockchain and then, they receive royalties whenever the art is resold. The art itself isn’t stored on the blockchain as it is considered too expensive to do so. So, what usually happens is the smart contract will contain a link for the respective artwork. Therefore, NFT’s deserve its praise for bringing artwork and drawings back into limelight and definitely holds a draw for all artists.
NFT’s are also seen as a major step in the direction of virtualisation and many technology based companies, social media companies like Twitter, Facebook endorsing it acts as an indication of how big this ‘step’ is, with Facebook even changing its company name to ‘Meta’, in reference to the virtual ‘metaverse’. NFT’s are considered a pivotal step for all these developments.
The controversial aspect of NFT’s are that most people still consider it a scam. While there is a sizeable amount of art theft and other related activities going on as well, what most people are really uneasy about this is the fact that you can make as much copies of the art as you want and can even screenshot the NFT without buying, so they can’t quite understand the urge to spend and buy NFT’s. There is also the fact that almost anything can be made an NFT and sold, as celebrities and likewise personalities have abused that privilege to earn huge sums of money by selling artifacts of not that much artistic value, ranging from pictures to trading cards to even tweets of themselves, which furthers demotes the image the public holds of NFT’s. And of course, there is always the lack of interest among people when it comes to art and drawings as well.
