By It is incredibly rare that a whole entire new type of product is created, but blockchain tech and cryptocurrency appears to have given birth to an entirely new and digital product – Crypto Art (also known as “NFT Art”).
Contents
1. What is Crypto Art?
2. How Crypto Art Helps Your Digital Marketing
3. How to Sell Crypto Art and Make Money
4. How to Invest in Crypto Art
5. Hire A Consultant
What is Crypto Art?
Crypto Art is a digital art file that has been tokenized on a blockchain. The art can be viewed by anyone and shared around the web, but the current owner and artist will always be known thanks to the power of blockchain systems. When a collector of the Crypto Art wants to move on from it, they can place it up for sale or auction and take payment in a variety of cryptocurrencies. A portion of the proceeds on the secondary market, typically 10%, is then sent to the original artist as a royalty.
In a way crypto art was the next logical progression of digital item ownership that started with in-game digital item purchases in World of Warcraft and today permeates the video gaming experience with gamers buying skins and other aesthetic items. Young adults and gamers are used to paying for digital artwork inside of video games now, and NFT backed crypto art gives them exclusive ownership something video games do not currently offer.
The market for NFT based artworks started exploding when crypto art pioneer Beeple had a video clip sell on a secondary market for $6.6 million. The 10-second video clip itself is free for anyone to watch, the value to the collector is the 1 for 1 ownership of the video itself. The original buyer paid around $67,000 for the video clip at auction in October of 2020 and resold it in late February for the eye popping figure.
If you want to learn more or dive in there is of course a Reddit community: /r/CryptoArt
How Crypto Art Helps Your Digital Marketing
1. Proves your brand is tech savvy – Crypto has been a trend since Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal paper on Bitcoin first hit the web in 2008. That trend has only continued to gain steam in various forms since then. Any brand, thought leader, or company that claims to be tech-savvy should at least experiment with new crypto trends.
2. It is trending right now – NFT based artwork is currently trending among young adults. For many brands like sports, entertainment, fast food, and fashion this is an incredible opportunity to market to a prime target demographic.
3. Selling Crypto Art can make your brand money – And a lot of it at the current rates. Of course artists are a perfect match for this, but as I’ll show below there are ways major brands can get involved too to build out a new revenue stream.
4. PR and Link Building – If done correctly a Crypto Art campaign could power your brand through the end of the pandemic with amazing PR from online outlets. There are also several ways to use this trend as a link building tactic to drive fresh, high-quality, inbound links to your website.
How to Sell Crypto Art and Make Money
While the current landscape is largely dominated by new artists who focus on the digital medium, including an increasingly famous artist named “Beeple” and the artist known as “Grimes”, one major brand has already jumped into NFT powered Crypto Art – the National Basketball Association.
The NBA is taking video clips of highlights from basketball games and selling them in “packs” similar to how printed sports cards are sold. The moments are not 1 for 1 (i.e. only 1 does not exist) but they do come in a limited quantity which has made the video clips incredibly popular among NBA fans. The packs and moments are sold through a separate platform called NBA Top Shot which launched in October of 2020. Currently 100% of the original sale price is going to the NBA itself (nothing is sent to players in the highlights). That hasn’t stopped NBA players from investing in the company that built Top Shot (Dapper Labs) or in the video moments themselves according to an article on HoopsHype. After the original purchase of a moment from a pack an NBA fan or collector can place their moment up for sale on the secondary market. Much like printed trading cards the moment can up or down in value as time goes on. Unlike printed trading cards the scarcity of these digital collectibles is built in from the start and will never be higher or lower.
The NBA has not exactly been at the forefront of technological innovation in the past, but appears to be working hard to make the brand more attractive to younger audiences by adapting to the often fast-moving world of internet trends and technology. By creating a platform to sell crypto art the NBA not only helps endear themselves to a younger set of viewers, they also generate cash flow during a global pandemic when other sources of revenue are down.
Mark Cuban himself is selling video clips on Rarible / OpenSea in an experiment outside of NBA Top Shot and the Flow blockchain that system uses.
While the NBA Top Shot program grew slowly at first, it would seem fans are starting to love the platform.
If your business has either an artistic edge or uses video clips, then you can sell 1 for 1 or 1 for x-amount ownership of these digital assets using your own platform or one of the numerous marketplaces that have popped up. If you are an artist of any kind you could tokenize a digital version of your artwork and sell it on a market place (see below). You could also create digital works just for an NFT sale to help promote your brand, idea, or products. If ever your creative team had an idea for a video clip or graphic about your brand that might have sounded too weird at the time, now might be the right time to let them have it and sell the item via an nft marketplace.
How to Invest in Crypto Art
Investing in Crypto Art is surprisingly simple, even if you are not quite sure what cryptocurrency is or how it works. All you really need to know is that artists / creators can sell digital ownership of pretty much anything including YouTube videos and Tweets though the vast majority is visual artwork in the form of short video animation. They can also determine the number of copies an item will ever have before it is tokenized on a marketplace.
Getting Started
To get started you will need a crypto wallet. Most marketplaces use or require Ethereum so a great way to start would be getting an Ethereum wallet (MetaMask is the most popular browser extension+wallet at the moment and you can use the Andrid or iOS app).
Fill Your Crypto Wallet With Ether
Once you have a crypto wallet you will need to get cryptocurrency. If you are going for Etheruem it might be best to purchase it from a marketplace. You can use Coinbase, Poloniex, Gemini, Kraken or if you setup a MetaMask wallet you can by from the Wyre exchange. You should also be able to deposit Ether (the Ethereum cryptocurrency) in to your wallet directly if you already have purchased some elsewhere.
If you don’t want to buy Ethereum you can mine it if you want to. Mining any cryptocurrency to be useful is a fairly hefty undertaking these days requiring expensive purpose-built mining rigs and a lot of electricity.
Find a Marketplace and Buy
Right now there are several marketplaces that all small differences between them. However, I expect like most other types of past internet technology (search, video hosting, social, etc…) this will ultimately cool off with many of these either closing or merging together.
Here is a current list of Crypto Art / NFT marketplaces where you can buy and sell crypto artwork and be the sole owner of an art piece viewed by millions online.
1. Rarible – Used by Mark Cuban, BoredElonMusk, Wu-Tang, and thousands of artists to “mint” (i.e. tokenize the work to an NFT) and sell the works.
2. OpenSea – Bills itself as the largest NFT marketplace and includes Rariable items as well as those posted to their website. Beyond crypto art you can also buy domain names for crypto wallets, digital land in virtual worlds, and digital replicas of sports cards. You must have an Etherum wallet to use this platform.
3. Mintbase – Allows digital artists to open a store of their NFT backed goods. Creations added here also get added to OpenSea.
4. NiftyGateway – This is where the big sale of Beeple’s “Crossroads” video occured. The platform appears to focus on drops where specific collections of works by artists are placed up for a limited time auction. Includes works by Steve Aoki, Grimes, Beeple, and dozens of other artists.
5. NBA Top Shot – Buy and sell NBA “moments”, collectible video highlights.
6. SuperRare – This marketplace looks smaller than the others but seems to have unique pieces and artists.
7. Foundation – Another smaller marketplace, this platform appears to be purely focused on auctions and has mostly short artistic video clips for sale.
8. Valuables – An NFT platform to buy and sell Tweets. Being used by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey to sell his first tweet as an NFT.
9. Makers Place – Home to exclusive art “drops” by digital creators.
There are risks with crypto art, as with any asset. For example an artist could create small variations of a single artwork and sell each small variation on a marketplace (this happens quite a bit in fact). Another risk is that artwork is tokenized by a specific marketplace and/or blockchain. An artist could conceivably create multiple copies of a digital file and tokenize them separately. The market for crypto art could collapse. While most people view their physical art to enjoy it, digtial art work requires a computer/smartphone to appreciate and is otherwise hard or expensive to display in a physical surrounding. Consumer taste and preferences could shift away from digital art back to physical art that is easier to feel and display or the demand for crypto art itself could fall which would reduce the value of a crypto art piece. A final risk would be an entire blockchain going offline which would be rare but when it happened would possibly destroy all validation of ownership and possibly the asset itself.
If you purchase something like the rights to a tweet, digital land in a simulation/game, or a YouTube video there are of course additional risks with that platform staying online or the asset being deleted by the platform for any variety of reasons.
This is a tweet of the static graphic of Beeple’s “Bull Run” crypto art. Only 271 NFT minted editions of the artwork were sold at a recent auction in December 2020 for a price of $969 each ($262,599 total). They came along with a physical copy of the rare video clip in a small encased video screen display. Currently digital copies of this are up for sale for between $135,271 to $123,456,789.10 on the secondary market.
Hire A Consultant
Want to get your brand or artwork on to NFT marketplaces but are not sure where to start? We are the world’s first Crypto Art Consultancy and we would love to help you make the plunge or get started. Joe and his team are cryptocurrency experts, digital marketing experts, social media pros, and know our way around the crypto art scene. We can answer your burning questions, help you make amazing artwork, spread the word about your crypto art drops, and get the crypto community excited about your NFT art.
Call us to chat: (469) 607-8460
Schedule a call or Zoom: Contact Us
This guide will be continually updated.
Last updated: 3/10/2021
Featured image is Beeple’s now famous “bull run” which has been cropped down