Jay Chou's million-dollar NFT was stolen! The news that appeared on April Fool's Day made the netizens in the comment area clearly divided into two categories:
People who don't know about NFT, anxious to ask what it is and why it's worth so much money?
People who know some NFTs wonder why it is stolen, which claims to be very safe.
The hidden NFTs, which were once only concerned by geeks, programmers, and niche artist circles, are really on fire after wave of celebrity participation and wealth myths.
These three letters that have been given too much meaning and explanation are closely related to the blockchain, metaverse and other technologies and concepts that have been brushed in the past two years, NFT is the abbreviation of non-homogeneous token (Non Fungible Token), which has uniqueness and non-replicability, and the digital collection issued through NFT technology is considered to be the key to entering the metaverse.
Imagine being in a home made of digital codes, and the showcases, walls, and even distant landscapes as far as your eye can see are made up of pieces of digital collection that belong only to you. Here, you can even restore the famous scene in "The Three-Body Problem" - the two-dimensional sun continues to expand, and soon forms a vast sea of fire on the plane, and the three-dimensional sun slowly sinks in the middle of this blood-colored sea of fire. And this two-dimensional sun belongs only to you.
Whether you agree with it or not, the vitality of the digital collection is amazing. According to the statistics of NFT Data Corporation, in the first quarter of this year, the overall market size of the global digital collection reached more than 160 billion yuan, more than the whole of last year, you know, last year's scale has been 213 times that of the previous year.
In China, Alibaba, Tencent and other big manufacturers have come down and opened a digital collection track. According to Tianyan, in Zhejiang alone, there are more than 130 enterprises that have established or carried out NFT and digital collection-related business in the past two years. At the same time, the market participants are mixed with mud and sand, such a beginning, like the group purchase, shared travel, these two Internet wars that you and I have experienced.
Every day, thousands of digital collections are launched on various well-known and unknown platforms, some of which are expected by millions of people, and some of them are empty after the release, and some are not cared about, and together with the release platform, they quickly disappear from the player's field of vision - yes, in less than a month of preparing this set of reports, there have been double-digit digital collection platforms banned and removed from the shelves.
So, which of these massive digital collections is worth paying attention to? Which ones don't live up to their name? Which ones are strongly artistic? What are the big ideas? Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News specially invited five senior media practitioners who have been working in the fields of art, technology, music, game animation and film for many years and have successively entered the NFT field since last year to form a "digital collection evaluation team".
They will pay attention to every digital collection launched by each platform in real time, and through observation, purchase, interview and other means, from the five aspects of culture, aesthetics, community, utility and price, they will score and objectively evaluate the 20 most noteworthy collections in the past 7 days.
Today, the first digital collection word-of-mouth list of the whole network was officially released. Next, more professionals will join the evaluation team and give relevant analysis and suggestions from time to time. This is the tool you currently use to understand the digital collection, and it is also a high-quality signpost that you can refer to when you want to enter the game.
For "Xiao Bai", if you want to understand the digital collection, you may wish to start from the stories of these people:
1
We hired a "guide": Dong Yuan, the founding partner of Bangshi Capital. He has long been engaged in venture capital in the field of scientific and technological innovation; the underlying technology of NFT, blockchain technology, as well as the digital collection and the related tracks in the meta-universe field are also his key tracks.
The first time I went to Dong Yuan, he was evaluating the digital collection scheme of the contracted artists, preparing to persuade the famous calligrapher to use the iPad to create digital collections.
Asking artists to "change a pen" and become a "digital artist" is also the core issue of the digital collection that Dong Yuan wants to talk to me about, confirming the right.
At the beginning of 2021, the original paintings of two top artists were burned in full view of the public:
Mornos ("The Idiot") by the famous street artist Banksy was burned by its holder and video-streamed live.
The painting "Hsinchu" by Leng Jun, a leading figure in the contemporary Chinese ultra-realistic painting school, was burned on the spot and a digital collection was generated, which was finally sold for 400,000 yuan.
In the eyes of insiders, this is not only not hype, but also an effective means to circumvent the copyright problem of digital collections.
Mornos ("The Idiot") by renowned street artist Banksy was broadcast live by its holders.
The publicly burned painting Mornos depicts a framed artwork next to the auctioneer next to a crowded auction house that reads, "I can't believe you idiots bought this." The painting itself is highly ironic.
Let's take another hypothesis: Someone has an ancestral jade pendant, and he works with an agency to cast a digital copy of the jade pendant, such as a three-dimensional model, into a digital collection.
At this point, a new virtual asset has been generated on the blockchain. But copyright implications ensued:
The original jade pendant is in the hands of this person, not to mention whether he will cooperate with other institutions on a whim; in case the jade pendant is stolen, there is a possibility that the digital collection of the jade pendant will be infinitely increased, and the scarcity of the digital collection will be diluted. The interests of both the issuer and the purchaser will be damaged.
Theoretically, only by destroying the physical object of the jade pendant can this situation be prevented. The question is, ancestral jade pendant, how to destroy?
"That's the trouble that offline assets can face in minting digital collections. NFTs are more suitable for purely digital assets, such as calligraphers writing on iPads. ”
You look at Banks's digital collection, "The Idiot": although the original was burned, the transaction price of the digital collection quickly tripled. The original work was burned in order not to leave the buyer with copyright hazards and to ensure that this digital collection is the only work online and offline. Only by doing so can the market value of works in the digital collection be maximized.
02
This year's Spring Festival, Hangzhou artist Ah Weige drew two colored line drawing tigers on the iPad and posted them in the circle of friends.
Hua Thirteen, a curator of the long-term cooperation, was excited when he saw it: "You tiger is too NFT!" "Thirteen made the tiger into an animation - flashed up, and then @ the director of the museum, investors, artist friends... A bunch of people.
On February 4 and 5, 2022, these two sparkling tigers were cast into digital collections of "Tiger Light Ten Colors" and "Tiger Color Shengxiang", which were issued at a unit price of 8.8 yuan and 9.9 yuan respectively, and 500 copies were issued each.
Ah Wei Ge Digital Collection "Tiger Color Fragrant"
I went to the distribution platform "Yuanyishu" yesterday to find the tiger, and I can still see it: they are all very energetic, their whole body is flashing, and their eyes are staring at you; they open their tiger basins and open their mouths, and they all "hear" to "scream" across the screen.
However, you can't have a tiger anymore. I check the release history: both days of trading hours are 10:00-10:00. Illustrate 1,000 tigers, almost empty of seconds.
Brother Ah Wei regretted it, and should have called his friends around him to buy more "a few tigers".
Ah Wei Ge Digital Collection "Ten Colors of Tiger Light"
According to the different agreements between the author and the platform, the author will receive royalty income for each purchase and sale of the digital collection within a certain period of time. The "decentralization" of the platform once again reminds Ah Weige of the traditional cultural areas he is most concerned about.
Offline, Ah Wei Ge was named "Brother Leg" because of his own style of creation. In 2010, in The town of Fotang in Yiwu, Ah Wei Ge was deeply impressed by the intricately carved "ox legs" (ancient architectural construction, scientific name "Liang Tuo") on the beams and pillars of the old house.
"The decorative patterns of the ox leg are very rich and symbolic, and the totems of various animals, plants, utensils and figures can not only reflect the social concepts and consciousness of an era, but also show the superb level and skill of ancient craftsmen."
Ask the villagers, who carved these cow legs? He only got the word "craftsman." "It's a very warm word." Ah Wei Ge felt sorry that he saw some of the local traditional architectural sculptures or decorative arts during his travels abroad, and the works had the artist's name and creation time on them. But our craftsmen are hidden behind the work; over time, the craft will be lost.
He began to draw cow legs. The ox leg on the beam jumped on the paper, and later appeared on plates, canvas shoes, backpacks, T-shirts... "The support of the 'ox leg', at first, was the support of mechanics, a roof frame to shield the wind and rain; later I knew the 'ox leg' as if it were a cultural support." ”
Retro and avant-garde, complex and blank creation, attracting more and more young people to care about tradition, it has become a national trend. Ah Wei Ge said that "tradition is the present of the future".
A cow's leg painted by Ah Wei Ge
Tradition, the future, and now, after officially taking on the identity of a "digital collector artist", Ah Wei Ge has a new perspective and once again thinks about the problem of traditional culture.
Once he saw a traditional craftsman selling a very beautiful basket in the old town, and she had worked hard all day to make it up. Someone inquired, the old man sold 100 yuan, tourists counter-offer. Brother Ah Wei was sad in his heart, 100 yuan is not expensive, and the value of the old man's work is far more than 100 yuan.
If this "basket" can become a digital collection, how will its vitality continue?
"For artists and creators, on the platform of digital collection, buyers are open and transparent, and the market is balanced."
On this platform, artists do not have to consider too much human sophistication, the works are automatically adsorbed to buy the crowd, their recognition of art is a consensus, willing to spend an agreed price, own the work. "It's not like we're going to meet some people in reality, and he'll say, 'You paint well, give it to me?' It's amazing. ”
03
Another thing that has excited many artists who try to get in is the NFT contract, which can be the idea itself.
For example, artist Pak created a digital collection project called Merge, which sells small balls one by one. Buyers can buy as many as they want, in unlimited quantities. But a buyer can only end up with one ball — that is, if I buy two Merges, the two balls merge into one ball. As it fuses, the volume and color of the ball also changes.
Visual artist Emre Tan rgan made a visualization tool to show the annexation process of "Merge".
By March 2022, the Merge project had nearly 30,000 buyers participating. The number of balls bought by each buyer is different, and the balls that are finally fused into different accounts are also different in size and color. You can think of these small balls that are sold as a dynamic work. The whole work will change over time as you trade, and no one knows what the work will eventually become.
By February, Pak's work had sold for 580 million yuan, the highest-grossing work in the history of digital collection distribution.
One idea, through a string of code, carried 580 million yuan. This is the form of digital creativity that arises with the NFT contract.
This is a unique addition to the creative realm that digital collections bring.
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Source: Qianjiang Evening News Hourly News Reporter Chen Yuhao Zhang Mijia Zhang Miao
Duty Editor: Zhou Qin