NFTs

NFTs are Non-Fungible Tokens. End of lesson. You can go home now. That’s because you have used NFTs all your life. You already know much of what you need to about NFTs. Only you didn’t call them that. 

Bus tickets, train tickets, season tickets of any kind, music or book tokens, museum passes, membership cards, petrol gift cards. These are essentially all non-fungible tokens. They are assets you have to buy in return for very specific benefits that can’t be swapped for other benefits (i.e. they’re non-fungible) unless that’s already been built into the token. For example, a season’s pass to a stadium gives you right to sit at certain seats but not others yet may entitle you to a free drink that you may choose to redeem or not. But that pass won’t allow you to go to concerts or buy petrol. 

These examples are all physical NFTs, whereas the buzz (and derision) today is about digital NFTs. Even so, daily NFTs are increasingly becoming digital. Think of your airline boarding pass on you smartphone. Or bus season tickets also on phones. Today’s NFTs are quite similar: in return for your money, you obtain a digital item with certain features and rights that you value. You become owner of an asset such as an image or a music file. This means that you can keep or sell it as you wish. But there may also be restrictions such as not being able to manipulate the asset or claim to be the creator. There are other differences between today’s digital NFTs and familiar NFTs: these include decentralisation, how the asset is stored and the use of blockchain technology for verification.  These topics are fully covered online by greater experts than me. 

What is most exciting for me is the move to greater decentralisation. This means greater autonomy, the ability to reach more people, and spread my work much further than ever before. And no more dependence on steel-and-glass galleries. True, we still depend on online portals to handle the technicalities of blockchain transactions but with the many portals that showcase and handle purchase transactions, it’s possible for any artist with intermediate computing skills and able to get online to enter the marketplace. If you already have the digital files of images (or music or 3D model) you’re more than halfway to making an NFT i.e. turning your work into a transactable commodity.

What happens when you combine a physical object such as a photograph with an NFT? You get the birth of an un-pretty but self-explanatory term, the phygital. You hybridise the physical and the digital to reap the advantages of the physical – its existential uniqueness – together with blockchain advantages such as the public ledger and near-instant transaction with cryptocurrency. With my items offered on Clubrare, for example, your purchase obtains the digital art in the form of an NFT plus you can also redeem a physical print – some are unique, some in limited editions.