Crypto art explained: The art world’s latest craze

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XPLUS

4 min readFeb 24, 2023

No, it’s not just a JPG. Crypto art is a digital token that’s one of a kind — in the truest sense of the word. It gives digital artists a new way to sell their artwork and allows art collectors to diversify their collections. It’s like Da Vinci, but make it NFT.

Crypto Art in a Nutshell

Crypto art is digital art that’s tokenized and minted on the blockchain. Crypto art lives in the Ethereum blockchain as a non-fungible token (NFT). Images, digital graphics, VR dreamscapes, music, and even videos can be minted as crypto art.

Once it’s tokenized, it will have a unique ID registered on the blockchain, so it can’t be duplicated or forged. Ownership is also verifiable. For many, it stores value effectively. Like modern art collectors, digital collectors buy crypto art and hope to sell them for a profit.

Can’t you just download free pictures of crypto art?

You can’t simply duplicate crypto art and call yourself an owner. However, crypto art is non-fungible, it’s the only one of its kind that exists in the digital space. And if you download a JPG image of the crypto art, it’s just a copy and not the original NFT.

To further illustrate, let’s take a physical painting as an example. Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, one of the most popular paintings in the world, is estimated to be worth over $100 million.

You can download an image of the painting for free, but that JPG file is worth nothing. You can buy a postcard of The Starry Night, but you can’t resell it for $100 million. You can recreate the painting with the same pigments, but it can’t command the same price. There’s only one The Starry Night in existence, and because it’s the original, it fetches the highest price tag.

Why Do People Love Crypto Art?

There are many reasons crypto art is popular. Hint: it’s not just about the money.

New avenues for creation and selling. Before, digital artists had to print their artwork to sell them. Now, they can mint their work as NFTs and sell them online, without a middleman. No need to talk with art dealers and galleries; so long as they have an internet connection, they can sell their work.
New avenues for buying and collecting. Crypto art is more accessible than physical artwork. There’s no need to visit a gallery or inspect a sculpture up close. Buyers don’t have to worry about storage or maintenance.
Royalties. As NFTs, crypto art can be locked in a smart contract that allows the creator to collect royalties every time their crypto artwork is sold on the secondary market. This is hardly possible for physical artworks.
Protection from forgery. The blockchain is tamper-proof, so it’s virtually impossible to forge crypto art. Each token has a guaranteed source, provenance, and verifiable ownership.
Huge profit. The most expensive painting in the world, Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, was sold for $400 million in 2017. The reason for the crazy price tag? It’s unique. It’s one of fewer than 20 Da Vinci paintings that survived the centuries.

This scarcity is the same factor that drives prices in the crypto art world. Crypto art, though new, has already generated millions of dollars in sales. And it’s slated to make millions more–maybe even billions–in the coming years.

Most expensive crypto art pieces

Like physical artwork, crypto art can command mind-boggling prices. The most expensive crypto art ever sold is Everydays: The First 5,000 Days by Beeple, which fetched a price of about $69 million at auction. It launched Beeple into the list of the world’s most valuable living artists, alongside David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

There are also a number of Cryptopunks that sold for tens of millions, like the bandana-clad alien punk #5822 and mask-wearing alien punk #7523.

Despite headline-making prices, most crypto art sells for only tens or hundreds of dollars despite headline-making prices. It’s a form of investment that can offer a high reward, but it entails a lot of risks. While there are a lot of success stories, one thing’s for sure: it’s not a get-rich-quick scheme, and those who want to dip their toes must do so with due diligence.

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