06/08/2023 by OTTO magazin:
There has been a craze sweeping across the Internet in a number of countries around the world for exactly two years now, for reasons incomprehensible to most people
Let’s look at the seven pictures appearing in front of you on the screen, their idea is very simple.
A person woke up one morning and decided to draw a picture and turn it into an NFT and offer it for sale on sites that sell NFTs.
These seven photos are the most expensive NFTs in the past week since the episode was filmed.
For example, the first photo on the right of the monkey whose neck is semi-automatic was sold last week while writting this article for 149 thousand dollars!🤕🤕
The image of a girl was sold for 354 thousand dollars,😮💨
the next photo called #335 Autoglyph was sold for 400 thousand dollars.
This is just a sample of the thousands of images that are sold daily on NFTs selling websites, they have no complicated content. Just simple pictures, a design of a figure, a regular digital drawing, or even doodles and drawings for young children.
What kind of insanity is this happening? To what extent could it go?
Before I answer, let me tell you a shocking story:
This is Mike Winkelmann, an American digital illustrator and graphic designer known by his more famous name Beeple.
In 2007, Mike was a simple young man at the age of 26.
At the beginning of the year, he thought that he would start a daily routine of documenting his design for 5000 days. He would wake up every day to make a design, i.e. a digital design out of his brainchild, publishing it to people, saving it and forgetting about it, and restarts the next day and so on.
Mike started his idea on May 1, 2007. He maintained his routine and designed 5,000 designs in 5,000 days, which means almost 14 years. Every day his skills were developing, people admired his designs more and more, until he made a name for himself.
On February 21, 2021, Mike finished the challenge, he then collected all his designs in one painting and turned it into an NFT, called it Everydays:
The First 5000 Days, then sold it 4 days later at the famous British auction house, Christie’s.
That NFT was sold on March 11 of the same year for a record 69.3 million dollars.
Yes, the number, as you heard it, is about 70 million dollars. It has become the most expensive work of art by a living artist, and it is the first NFT to be sold through the prestigious British auction house Christie’s, the most famous auction house in the world.
Now, no one needs to rack their brain for designing – spending a lot of time like Beeple.
On March 1, CZ, the CEO and founder of the Binance platform, announced a new AI-supported tool called Bicasso, through which you can design and convert your designs into NFTs and offer them for sale on the Binance platform for selling NFTs. For those who do not know Binance, it is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world.
Founded by CZ in 2017, the daily trading volume on the platform is currently $70 billion.
What are these NFTs, and why are they sold at such exorbitant prices? What are its forms?
Is this real art, or is it a bubble with undesirable consequences?
Are those who buy these works maniacs? Or is it just individual standards?
Why do they pay all that money for pictures that you and I and every other person on the planet can easily download on our smartphones and devices, watch them and send them to each other on WhatsApp?
The important question is how did the use of NFT develop and become part of supply chains today?
This is a sample of the significant questions of today’s new article today, which we will try to answer together…💋💋💋
First, I would like to confirm that NFT buying and selling is only available in countries wherein NFT cryptocurrency trading is authorized, So, this article is addressed to them.
I like to wear it especially while writting, although I have newer watches, but this watch is special for me. If you want to buy a watch like it, you will either go to a watch store or search online, and you will probably find thousands of watches that are similar or close to it in design and color and at different prices. It is natural that you will buy the one that closely looks-alike it.
But does this mean that my watch is replaceable?
I mean, can I exchange it for any other watch of one of my friends, for example?
The truth is, no, my watch is not replaceable, why?
Because it is not just a wristwatch, it rather has an immaterial and emotional value for me, therefore it is very exquisite for me.
Almost all of us have things exactly like this, related to certain memories or events, and if someone offered you double the price, you will not probably agree to give them up.
That is why we describe these things as “non-replaceable..
Economically, all things are divided into two parts: either things that are easily fungible or non-fungible due to their scarcity.
In other words, the daily products that we eat or drink, or the currency denominations, are mostly fungible.
Huge numbers of the same product are produced by factories daily.
Looking at a painting like the Monalisa – appearing on the screen.
Can we replace it with any other Monalisa painted by anyone?
Of course not, the original painting is an unparalleled painting all over the world and therefore it is non-fungible.
NFTs stands for Non-fungible Tokens, which are digital assets that are stored on a blockchain.
Still do not get it?
I mean, anything that can be transferred to NFT, but it must be rare in order to be sold, or valuable to someone else who is ready to pay money for it.
In other words, it must be unique and there is nothing like it, or non-exchangeable for its artistic or moral value, or both together,
like that watch of mine, it has a moral value for me, and a mass value for you, so I can transfer it to NFT.
Here, the NFTs or non-fungible tokens are considered as certificates of ownership of the assets, whether these assets are virtual like the pictures shown at the beginning of the article, or physical ones like my watch for example.
So, when I am about to sell it, it means that I am selling its property to someone else.
So, how can I transfer something that I have, whether it is a digital or virtual asset, or a physical asset, let’s say my watch, into NFT? Actually, the steps are pretty simple:
Firstly, if I have a material object like a watch, I will either make a 3D video or take a set of photos of it.
However, if I make a NFT of a photo I have on my mobile phone or a photo I drew using any app or a digital design, then of course I don’t need to photograph it.
Secondly, I convert the photos I took, for example of the watch, to NFT.. How is that?
By signing up to a platform specialized in NFTs such as the Binance NFT platform and uploading the collection of photos that you took of the watch, then write an accurate description of the watch itself, the characteristics of its parts, and why it is rare. After that, the platform itself would upload it to the blockchain.
The blockchain, in a nutshell, is a record for keeping data and information, including the NFT data or the non-replaceable code, and thus you are the only one all over the world who owns this NFT, and the whole world can log in verifying your ownership of it, and it is impossible for anyone to steal or hack it as no one else does have the keys.
In order to know in detail what the blockchain chain, keys and others are, it is necessary to watch the short articles of the crypto series, in which I explained in a pretty simple way the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
We uploaded 8 articles related to each other, and we will replenish the series soon, God willing.😊
Either you use it for personal use, such as changing profile picture on social media, Twitter for example, then you will sell it.
In case you decided to keep it for sometime, not selling it instantly.
You will need to market it, as a non-fungible token or NFT, but you are not willing to sell it immediately.
As you want lots of people to get to know it first, and then you sell it to the highest price in the future.
In other words, back to that autoglyph that we talked about in the introduction, the person who minted it, that is to transfer it to NFT, 4 years ago, kept it for a while, and the last price it was sold for was 400 thousand dollars, as we explained.
This is an option, another option is that: after you create the NFT, that you sell the code instantly, you will then upload it to one of the NFTs selling sites as an auction and specify the initial price or the ask or the first price, and of course buying and selling takes place through cryptocurrencies such as ether, for example.
I can also add a Royalties percentage condition to it, which is that I take a certain percentage of the sale every time this NFT is sold later after that.
There are several well-known platforms for buying and selling NFTs, such as the Binance NFT platform..
Of course, the data we see on the screen is not fixed. It is just the data at the time of writting this article.
For example, in the column on the left under the top collections, we will find the names of the companies that produce the NFTs or the owners of the NFTs. So, if I upload a NFT of my watch – may God be generous to me – and it has a large amount of trading, you will find the OTTO Magazin Blog on the left like these companies.😮💨🤪
The other column shows the amount of sales made in the last 24 hours for that group of NFTs.
As we see, the first set of works were sold for 6 thousand ether = $9.7 million in 24 hours.
The next column measures the percentage change in sales. The next column is the lowest priced NFT
in that group, and it’s around $24,000. The next column expresses the percentage change in the price of the lower NFT.
The next column is the owners in that group and here they are only 2.
The last column is the number of NFTs in that group, which is 10,000 NFTs.
Okay I have turned my watch into NFT right before writting this article,
I uploaded it on the Binance NFT platform, as you can see, a practical experience for you. Here a question arises.
Will I sell the watch as NFT, that is, as a picture only? Or will I sell it and the watch itself as a physical asset?🤔🤔🤔🤔
This is up to my choice. Either I sell it as NFT only or I sell it as NFT with the watch itself.
Well, what am I going to do with that watch? I will sell it as NFT , along with the watch itself, for an important and charitable cause that you will know by the end of the article 😁 and that is why it is necessary for you to keep reading until the end.
Here someone can ask me a nice and obvious question:
Why would any person buy any photo in order to remain the original owner of this photo whereas they can view it on the internet freely or take a screenshot and use it completely free of charge?😵💫😵💫😵💫😵💫
In principle, anything that is valuable for people all over the world, its value is based on the concept that people had agreed or decided that it has value, that’s it.
For example, look at this Bored Ape #8817 photo, why would this photo in front of you be sold as NFT in October 2021 for $3.4 million? Why should anyone pay such a fortune for a monkey photo?
Simply because there is a group of people who decided that this image has value, whether you agreed or disagreed with it, and regardless of our opinion about it, they started bidding on it to some extent, and its price reached that much until it was sold.😍
The same idea applies to the Mona Lisa. It is one of the most valuable works of art in the world, and it is the most expensive painting in the world, although it is not for sale. Its estimated price is about $860 million.🤒🤒🤒🤒
Can you imagine the amount of money, guys? Almost a billion dollars in something, that is from A to Z is nothing but canvas, wood and paint, why? Simply because a large group of people, art lovers, experts and others have decided that it is the most valuable in the world for certain reasons.😇😇
The same idea is going on here, but through technology in the form of digital assets or digital art, which is the NFTs for photos, music, and creative materials.
Oh, wait a minute? Does music or other things besides pictures and graphics convert to NFTs?🙄
The answer is yes.. The NFT can be, for example, a piece of music. That’s normal.
Like some pieces of music by the Canadian singer Grimes, which were sold in March 2021 as NFTs for $6 million.🙈🙉🙊
It can be a post on Facebook or a tweet on Twitter even. Like the first tweet on Twitter of one of the site’s founders, Jack Dorsey, which was sold for $ 2.9 million.
Keeping in mind that this was March 2021, the time when the phenomenon of NFTs was widespread and had a very wide momentum. Of course, in 2022, the NFTs market declined sharply and lost this momentum.🥵
Therefore, we find, for example, that the price of the tweet NFT has now decreased, and there is no one who is willing to buy it.
The NFT could be a YouTube video, like the famous Charlie Bit My Finger, it was uploaded in 2007 on YouTube, and it was still a nascent site, wherein two children appear in it, one of them biting his brother’s finger, that’s all, that’s all the action, and in May 2021 the rights to the clip were sold and its ownership was transferred as NFT from YouTube for approximately 761 thousand dollars.
NFTs can be objects in a game. Like the game Axie Infinity, all the outfits in that game, character skin changes, etc. are sold as NFTs.
The purpose of selling the NFTs may be to raise money for charity, and this is what we will do at the end of the article, by the way..
I would like to conclude here, but before I finish the article, we must note something to be prepared for the second part of this topic..
All this madness is one thing, by the way there are people who see it as a bubble that will explode any time, and the real benefit from my point of view of NFT is another entirely different thing.
The point, for me, is the benefit in answering questions like:
How did this technology develop and become part of supply chains and industries today?🤨
Here, a revolution began to take place, and it is gaining more significance with time.
How are the NFT being used to track the sources of food, medicine or clothing, for example.
How is it used in real estate? How the NFTs eliminate fraudulent companies flooding the market with counterfeit components, parts and products consequently protecting good companies from huge losses due to imitation of their products?🤔
How the NFTs prevent child labor and improve working conditions in poor countries, such as some African countries, for example.
How does it contribute to boosting tourism and the economy in countries like Japan, for example?
For me, this is the most important thing, and this needs an article for its own, because it is of crucial significance, as explaining it in a nutshell in this article would be completely incorrect.
God willing, I will make another article about the NFTs revolution in supply chains.
Tell me your opinion in the comments if you’d like to see it soon.
Here we come to the charity auction that we ought to do together…
I get many questions, as you know, about this watch, and as I explained in the inception of the articles introduction, this watch is neither expensive nor a brand, it is just a watch with a special memory and a special value for me.
I decided to make an NFT for it on the Binance NFT platform and open an auction for it.
I will sell this NFT at the highest price to the highest bidder with the watch itself.
We will launch this auction soon, God willing, until the largest number of people know about it,
and the party to which the value of the watch itself and the NFT will be donated is the Moroccan Foundationes.😍🥰
See you soon…💋💋💋
Written by,
Otto Yassine.
Content Editor, & Ceo of OTTO Magazin.
WhatsApp: +212663069516
Em@il: otto.magazine@otto.ma