Web3 Series: The Laws of Digital Art
How NFTs have given rise to a new industry
The most Mike Winkelmann had ever made from a given copy of his art was $100.
A longtime digital artist, he faced a seemingly intractable problem: how to share and drive awareness of his work while convincing people to pay for something they could copy for free.
The laws of digital reality are naturally different from physical reality. The physical world offers scarcity by design. Objects won’t multiply unless someone puts time and effort into making them multiply. That carries a cost.
The digital world isn’t bound by such constraints. Any artwork can be copied and distributed anywhere at the speed of light for nothing at all. Digital art, you might say, has a “scarcity problem.” Once a digital artist publishes their work, it can multiply infinitely at anyone’s leisure.
Winkelmann, more commonly known in the art world as Beeple, was left stuck between his passion for digital creation and its unfortunate lack of economic viability.
Then, in the fall of 2020, he began to hear rumblings of a new way to track digital assets via a technology (regrettably) known as non-fungible tokens (NFTs). These tokens, he learned, were stored on blockchain, which, as we’ve…
