Text/Golden Wrong Knife Channel
Caption / Visual China
In 1975, Americans witnessed a very outrageous business.
An American named Gary Dahl, holding a common stone that can be found everywhere, tells others that it is pet rock, that is, a stone that can be used as a pet.
He also cited the benefits of pet stones: pet stones don't need to be cared for; training pet stones is easy, and they can easily learn to sit, not move, and pretend to be dead.
In half a year, he sold 1.5 million small stones and made $6 million!
Today, 46 years later, a business that looks even more outrageous and lucrative is sweeping the world.
On August 22, Sun Yuchen, the founder of Tron, spent $500,000 to buy a picture inspired by pet stones.
There are 99 such pictures, each of which is the same except for the color.
On September 2, Sun Yuchen announced that he had spent $10.5 million (about 67.75 million yuan) to buy a WeChat avatar. If you calculate the average house price in Beijing of 50,000, you can buy 13 sets of 100 square meters of houses.
The most outrageous thing about these things is that these diagrams are not the work of a master, and they can be downloaded for free at any time on the Internet.
Ordinary people copy + paste, the province of 13 suites.
Buy these seemingly worthless diagrams, what are the diagrams?
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="213" > profiteering that makes the world's richest man blush</h1>
A diagram that looks worthless to ordinary people is valuable in the eyes of the big guys.
Because those are all NFT works.
NFT (Non-fungible Token), Chinese literal translation is "non-homogeneous token", is an application that combines blockchain and cryptocurrency.
What is a non-homogeneous token?
In the crypto world, this bitcoin and that bitcoin, of the same value, can be exchanged or replaced, called "homogeneous tokens."
NFTs are different, each NFT has its own value, is unique and inseparable. Just like "Qingming on the River" and "Mona Lisa", although they are both paper and antiques, they have their own value, and no one can replace anyone.
Therefore, after the digital work is NFTed, it is equivalent to having a unique certificate of ownership.
For Sun Yuchen, who spent $10.5 million to buy an avatar, he can say: Although everyone can use this avatar, I am the one who really owns this avatar, and mine is the genuine one.
It still doesn't sound like an egg, but people keep pushing into the NFT market.
Twitter founders took his first tweet, the world's first tweet, and sold it for $2.9 million after NFTization. This tweet is just five words "just setting up my twttr" (just set up my tweet), which is a thousand words.
The former world's richest man, Musk, also came to join in the fun, saying that he wanted to release an NFT-themed song and sell it as an NFT.
Netizens opened their minds and began to nest dolls: "I want to take Musk's Tweet screenshot of 'I want to sell this song about NFT as an NFT' as an NFT" as an NFT."
Even Japanese AV actresses have not been able to resist the temptation of NFTs. Uehara's 3 photos sold for tens of thousands of dollars after becoming an NFT, which is much easier than making money from filming.
Hatano Yuki played with the NFT photo blind box. Or the teacher Fu is more able to play.
With more and more people joining, the NFT market is getting hotter and hotter, almost to the point of madness, ordinary people can not understand at all.
A writer wrote an op-ed about NTF for The New York Times and hung the image of the article on the trading platform as an NFT, with the lowest price set at about $800.
Unexpectedly, it ended up selling for $560,000! Taken aback, he wrote another article: "Why Would Anyone Pay $560,000 for Pictures of My Column?" 》。
But that's not really crazy.
On March 11, at Christie's auction, an NFT work by a digital artist named Beeple, "Every Day: The First 5,000 Days," went all the way from a $100 reserve price to $69.34 million!
Every Day: The First 5,000 Days
This price is much higher than most works by leonardo da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso and other masters.
However, this work is just a 316MB JPG file, and every pixel in it is a picture created by Beeple, with a total of 5,000 paintings, each of which can be downloaded for free online.
After the auction, he couldn't hide his excitement on Twitter: Holy fuck.
Driven by this wave of fanatical people, the influence and market size of NFTs have expanded rapidly.
According to CoinGecko data, the current market size of NFTs has exceeded $20 billion.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="214" > an image that can be downloaded for free at any time</h1>
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="215" > why is it more expensive than Picasso's original? </h1>
Some people liken NFTs to "bragging capital."
This statement is not difficult to understand, after all, buyers have bought an NFT work, and others can still browse, copy or download the work at any time on the Internet.
For buyers, it seems really useless to brag to others that "I did buy it".
This GIF that anyone can download, its NFT sold for $580,000
If it were that simple, the NFT market would probably not be so hot.
Every NFT is unique and inseparable. Moreover, after the digital work becomes an NFT, the blockchain will record every transaction and every owner, and everyone can find out who is the owner of the NFT now.
What do these features of NFTs mean for buyers?
First, authenticity. Compared to traditional works, buyers of NFTs never have to worry about buying fakes or damage.
The director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was once asked, "How many of these artworks do you think are hanging on the walls that may be fake?" He replied, "I don't know." ”
NFTs will not have such a situation, absolute fidelity. For people who are accustomed to and like digital assets, they are willing to spend money on digital albums and game equipment, and there is no reason to refuse NFTs. So "crypto cats" were so popular that some people even spent $100,000 to buy a virtual cat.
The popular crypto cat
If it is still difficult to understand, then think about applying NFTs to tickets, bills, property deeds, and ID cards to ensure their "authenticity", is it valuable enough?
Second, scarcity. Once each work is NFT-oriented, it has a unique identity.
On August 28, NBA star Curry announced that he had spent $180,000 on an NFT creation, a "boring ape," and replaced it with an avatar.
Many netizens followed the trend and replaced their avatars with "boring apes", jokingly saying that they saved $180,000.
"Boring Ape" is a 10,000 gloomy ape NFT work launched by the Boring Ape Club, and the "Boring Ape" purchased by Curry is a rare species, and the characteristics of the eyes, fur and other places are very rare, so the price is not cheap.
In other words, it is not because the work is in the form of an NFT that it is expensive, but because the work itself is valuable.
It is only after the NFT that the scarcity of the work is ensured - no matter how many "boring apes" are copied by netizens, they cannot threaten the genuine "boring apes" in Curry's hands - and add to its value.
In order to ensure scarcity, the NFT market also has some cruel operations, such as destroying physical works.
On March 8 this year, the famous street artist Banksy's work "Idiot" was burned by its holders and video-streamed live, and then sold an NFT version of the painting, which eventually sold for about 2.47 million yuan.
Ironically, there's a framed work of art in an auction hall that says, "I can't believe you idiots bought this thing."
On March 25, in Beijing's 798 Art District, an ink painting by the famous domestic painter Leng Jun, "Hsinchu", was also burned on the spot, and an NFT version was generated, which became the only original work of the painting, and finally sold for 400,000 yuan.
Netizens joked: It is recommended to burn Leonardo da Vinci's painting to generate NFTs.
Judging from the crazy situation of the NFT market today, if anyone who loves NFT has Leonardo da Vinci's painting in his hand, he may dare to burn it.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="216" > the explosive NFT market, is it cutting leeks? </h1>
Beeple, which sold for $69.34 million, said in an interview with Fox: The price of NFT is definitely a bubble.
According to common sense, the NFT is only a carrier of the presentation of the work, and the value of the NFT work should be determined by the work itself. Just like 100 dollars, put in the wallet and put in the safe, the value should be the same.
However, all kinds of nonsensical NFT works are sold at jaw-dropping high prices, and if there is no hype, it is a ghost.
The stone figure mentioned at the beginning was actually launched in 2017, when it was worth only a few hundred dollars, and only 20 stone figures were sold in the following three years.
It wasn't until this year's NFT fire that the remaining 80 stone drawings were snapped up, and the price doubled hundreds of times.
Beeple, for example, was previously an obscure digital artist who had never sold a single piece until 2020.
For the sky-high auction, Ji Tao, a researcher at the Auction Research Center of the Central University of Finance and Economics, said: This can only represent the attention and scarcity brought about by the current high freshness and strong newsworthiness of NFT art, and does not represent the author's artistic standards, as well as the sustainability and value-added space of the future market for his works.
Without Beeple, there will be other people.
Digital artist Beeple
In China, Ali, Tencent, NetEase and other large manufacturers have begun to test the water of NFT, but due to policy reasons, China's NFT market is far less hot than abroad.
Even so, we can still see the hype of NFTs.
On June 23, Alipay, together with Dunhuang Art Research Institute and Assassin Wu 67, launched 4 NFT payment code skins, which were sold out online.
Although Alipay emphasized that "users must not use NFT digital works for any commercial purposes", the NFT payment code skin, which originally cost 9.9 yuan, was soon recycled on salted fish at a minimum price of 500 yuan and a maximum of 100,000 yuan.
However, hype people may not be able to laugh to the end.
James Surowiecki, a columnist for The New Yorker, said that in this wave of NFT boom, the ultimate real winner is likely not the people who speculate in the NFT space, but the companies and technology service providers that provide services for speculative trading.
In NFT transactions, ethereum from the blockchain platform "Ethereum" is commonly used. Just one "cryptopunk" project, 10,000 pixel images, made Ether on fire.
On August 2, one of the pixel images, "Cryptopunk 3100," sold for 42,000 Ether, or about $108.6 million, making it currently the highest-priced NFT work in the world.
$100 million worth of pixel images
There's also OpenSea, the world's largest NFT trading platform, which sold more than $1.9 billion last month, 237 times as many as it sold in January!
For those who speculate, the carnival of the NFT market is actually full of the smell of cutting leeks.
epilogue:
The chaos of the NFT market, of course, can not be used to negate the positive side of the NFT.
For example, for digital creators, NFTs are useful.
They no longer have to worry about piracy. Sending a new song does not have to go through the record company, saving the platform commission.
At the same time, creators can also take a draw from each subsequent second-hand transaction, generally 10% of the proportion, lying and earning.
Of the three NFT works of the Japanese actress Uehara Mentioned above, one sold for 2 ethers, and the buyer later offered a resale price of 240 ethers. If sold, Uehara would receive a royalty gain of 24 Ether.
Therefore, for NFTs, it should not be advisable to over-promote or sing down.
Like most technologies, NFTs are not good or bad.
Whether it is an outlet or a bubble depends only on the person: is it more rational, or more crazy?