WTF is an NFT?

As an artist who was interested in cryptocurrency before I became a Crypto Artist, it was easy for me to see the value in NFTs and the opportunity they provide.

NFTs supply a way for independent artists to capitalize on their work, retain creative ownership, and reward those who support their career the most; their fans. Convincing other artists of this great opportunity has proven difficult as they often times are not involved in cryptocurrency, don’t know what an NFT is, or even worse they heard major publications make the claim that NFTs are harmful to the environment and have sworn them off for good.

Instead of getting into technical terms, I want to explain it by comparison to something we’re all familiar with: social media.

When you open your favorite social media site and upload a picture, video, song, or even text, you publish that content onto the centralized servers of that site at no cost to you. Once posted, it’s considered the property of the site, and any monetary gain earned from the content goes straight to them.

The social media platform may offer you some of the returns, but they pay you fractions of what they make, and you don’t qualify until jumping through a number of hoops. Even if you’re lucky enough to make money from your social media content, you’re subjected to the platform’s rules. The platforms also reserve the right to withhold monetization if you produce content they disapprove of.

Now Let’s Compare That to the Popular NFT Marketplace, OpenSea

When you make an OpenSea account and go to publish ( or ‘mint’ ) an image, video, audio, or even a 3D model, you pay a minting fee. You’re minting onto a decentralized network of servers that OpenSea does not control, and the fee is the incentive for those running the network to upload your post (‘digital asset’) onto the network.

The post is then visible through the OpenSea website, but the content belongs to you and sits securely in your crypto wallet. Ownership remains yours until you decide to either give it to someone else or sell it through their open marketplace.

When your content is transferred to the crypto wallet of its new owner, the network keeps an immutable record that you are the original creator of the content, every future owner of the content and the price it sells for. You even have the option to set royalties on your content so that you continue to earn on each future sale.

As you become more popular, the value of your NFTs will rise, and those who buy your work early will benefit. OpenSea’s incentive to show your content is the small 2.5% fee they collect each time a sale occurs.

NFTs and blockchain technology are not alien or abstract concepts but rather more-efficient improvements upon tools we already use. When the media took out a smear campaign against NFTs, they were preying on the general public’s lack of understanding of what this technology is.

Posting data on a centralized server has the exact same impact on the planet as posting it on a decentralized one. See the irony of all those angry anti-NFT social media posts?

So what was the incentive to attack NFTs?

The incentive was the attempt to stop NFTs from upending the current economic structure. Both NFTs and cryptocurrency are advancements in technology that can remove the control that centralized 3rd parties have over every industry on the planet.

If there is no barrier between you and the consumer that wants to purchase your products, no central authority can take a cut of your profits and they cannot stipulate what you create.

NFTs facilitate a true free market.