NFT or Non-Fungible Token is a token that certifies a digital asset to be unique. A wide range of assets including, digital art, music, tweets, memes, are being sold as NFTs. NFT-related content has been widely shared on social media sites such as Twitter. We aim to understand the dominant factors that influence NFT asset valuation. Towards this objective, we create a first-of-its-kind dataset linking Twitter and OpenSea (the largest NFT marketplace) to capture social media profiles and linked NFT assets. Our dataset contains 245,159 tweets posted by 17,155 unique users, directly linking 62,997 NFT assets on OpenSea worth 19 Million USD. We have made the dataset public. We analyze the growth of NFTs, characterize the Twitter users promoting NFT assets, and gauge the impact of Twitter features on the virality of an NFT. Further, we investigate the effectiveness of different social media and NFT platform features by experimenting with multiple machine learning and deep learning models to predict an asset's value. Our results show that social media features improve the accuracy by 6% over baseline models that use only NFT platform features. Among social media features, count of user membership lists, number of likes and retweets are important features.
The Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market has experienced extraordinary growth since the beginning of 2021. This has attracted attention from investors who are seeking alternative investments. However, the investment performance of the NFT market has not been investigated yet. This paper explores NFTs as an alternative investment. More specifically, it investigates the NFT Collection “CryptoPunks” as an investment option with the focus on evaluating the investment performance, assessing the variables that determine prices, calculating the portfolio diversification potential, and comparing the investment performance to other financial assets. Therefore, a quantitative study with secondary data is conducted using the Hedonic Regression method. Data on CryptoPunks and other asset types are retrieved from different public domains. The time frame that is observed is the 1st June 2018 until the 31st May 2021. The CryptoPunk data set includes 11,864 transactions with information on the collectible and the sale. The results indicate that CryptoPunks would have been the best investment over the past three years with an average monthly return of 34.19% and a standard deviation of 61.76%. Next to that, the Sharpe ratio indicates a good return-risk trade-off. One other main finding is that the rarity of the attributes and type of the CryptoPunk has a positive effect on prices. Besides that, CryptoPunks has portfolio diversification potential due to relatively low correlation with other asset classes. This paper provides one of the first statistical explorations of NFTs from an economic perspective. The paper also examines the potential of NFTs as an alternative investment asset. The paper concludes that (based on the period studied) NFT collectibles can be a viable investment, with good returns, and a diverse risk profile that is uncorrelated from other benchmark assets, such as art, treasury bills and major cryptocurrencies.
Abstract Ubiquitous digitization enables promising options for cultural heritage preservation. Therefore, a new approach is presented that considers deployment scenarios by linking heritage science to tourism. Such an approach is necessary because neither technology nor society views can be treated separately to obtain deployable solutions of a wider social, and even national importance. Clearly, while the traditional approaches to cultural heritage preservation will remain a gold standard, they will be increasingly complemented by digital preservation techniques. Thus, based on practical implementations and lessons learnt in other areas, this multidisciplinary framework paper analyses existing disruptive information technologies deployments. In line with the findings it presents a novel technological architecture tailored to the needs of cultural heritage preservation that deploys an open blockchain architecture. The architecture preserves the advantages of traditional blockchains, which made this technology so important, while enabling energy efficient implementations that can be deployed in mobile applications. By additionally using the contribution-ware principle it links it to tourism, where the identification of users focused incentives and business models play a central role. It is obvious that tourism is a good candidate in such preservation efforts due to the organic links between it and cultural heritage and can support further developments in the heritage preservation domain.
Shimon Kogan, Igor Makarov, Marina Niessner, Antoinette Schoar
Trading in cryptocurrencies has grown rapidly over the last decade, primarily dominated by retail investors.Using a dataset of 200,000 retail traders from eToro, we show that they have a different model of the underlying price dynamics in cryptocurrencies relative to other assets.Retail traders in our sample are contrarian in stocks and gold, yet the same traders follow a momentum-like strategy in cryptocurrencies.Individual characteristics do not explain the differences in how people trade cryptocurrencies versus stocks, suggesting that our results are orthogonal to differences in investor composition or clientele effects.Furthermore, our findings are not explained by inattention, differences in fees, or preference for lotterylike stocks.We conjecture that retail investors hold a model of cryptocurrency prices, where price changes imply a change in the likelihood of future widespread adoption, which in turn pushes asset prices further in the same direction.
Wei-Shan Lee, A John, Hsiu-Chun Hsu, Pao‐Ann Hsiung
In the traditional approach to a digital asset management system, the data processing mechanism is not transparent or visible to the data owners since the data is managed solely by the service provider. With the rapid development of blockchain technology, the above issues can be resolved by leveraging the tamper-resistance and decentralization characteristics of blockchain. However, post the implementation of the EU General Data Protection Rules (GDPR) in 2018, the protection of data owners has taken center stage. This has led to several principles of personal data deletion, such as Storage Limit and the Right to Be Forgotten to conflict with the blockchain. It is also observed that, out of the various smart contracts deployed to manage digital assets, often only specific smart contracts are invoked, while the rest of the deployed smart contracts are rarely invoked, leading to smart contract designs exhibiting similar patterns with very little creativity. This current scenario has motivated us to propose SPChain, a smarter and private GDPR-compliant digital asset management framework enabled by blockchain. In this approach, a decentralized InterPlanetary File System has been adopted to solve the problem of SPOF. In addition, the combination of digital assets with artificial intelligence models has been proposed so as to make digital assets accessible to a larger number of applications and to enable better creativity. In this design, artificial intelligence models have been run in independent, virtualized containers and invoked through smart contracts. The proposed SPChain can be applied to the field of digital art management to provide a complete implementation based on the Hyperledger Fabric. Using this proposed framework, model developers, digital art creators, collectors, service providers, as well as third parties can not only benefit from securely managing digital assets and combining them with AI models, but also from simultaneously complying with the rights stipulated in the GDPR. During the course of the experiments conducted, the latency, throughput, and resource consumption of different functions in the smart contracts have been measured. After adjusting the batch timeout of the block and the maximum number of transactions in a block, the throughputs were observed to be about 500 TPS, with 10 to 15 TPS for reading and writing operations, respectively. The latency ranges were found to range from 0 to 7 seconds, with 2.5 to 5 seconds for reading and writing operations, respectively.
The creation of artworks in the metaverse as unique files that exist on a blockchain world of the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have revitalized discussions over the uniqueness of a work of art. Similar to the art world market in Second Life, this has presented a novel way to collect imported or natively digital art. This raises the following questions: What are the processes that artwork undergoes in the web 3.0 or metaverse? What constitutes the reproduction/recreation of a work of art? Which tools can be exploited to create more content for this universe? How does this new approach affect ownership, scarcity and authenticity? Unlike art productions that find a place in museums or galleries, Daragaç Art Collective independently uses the streets both as their location, and as their canvas. This creates the need to store the artworks as fully as possible in any form available. With this aim, a team of architects, designers and software engineers designed, implemented and tested a mobile application to represent and recreate the experience of the artworks in the digital environment. The artworks of independent artists were collected virtually and compiled in a relational database over the years, and are displayed in their geographical coordinates, and represented in the 3D world. After discussion on how to represent the artworks, it was decided that some only exist in videos and photographs, therefore, we decided to use the archaeology of digital data and present them in 3D space, to ensure their continued existence once they had been performed or exhibited. Illustrated by the case of our augmented application, this paper discusses the reproduction of ownership and scarcity of artworks in terms of preserving a cultural heritage in the metaverse.
Within the last decade, Digital currency has attracted more and more attention in recent years. Its existence and application not only changes people's consumption patterns, but also brings in changes to the modern economy model as digital currency becomes an investment choice. Despite its popularity and advancement, an extensive review of recent research on digital currency in the financial market has not been available. Accordingly, this article conducts a comprehensive review of digital currency in the financial markets by reviewing the existing literature. We demonstrate the importance of digital currency through different perspectives and applications. In addition, this paper outlines the challenges and trends in digital currency.
In 2017, the technology of unique cryptographic tokens NFT (Non-Fungible Token) was created to help artists to monetize their creativity in the digital environment. But today the NFT world is a huge market segment in the internet space: millions of users all over the world, including famous artists, exhibit NFT works and buy and sell them. The nominal size of the market, according to various estimates, was $22 billion in 2020 and $50 billion in 2021; and the volume of sales only continues to grow: already in January of this year 2022, at least half a billion transactions were made weekly. In this article, the author presents a study of the Korean segment of the NFT market based on the NFT token sale and resale platforms OpenSea and Rarible, highlights the main directions of works and the main names of NFT artists, and examines the Korean segment of the cryptocurrency market used for selling cryptocurrency tokens. The author also analyzes how NFT technology first appeared in South Korea and was spread to individuals and organizations, and presents data on the largest transactions, comparing NFT tokens of artists from South Korea with tokens of other foreign artists. Over the past few years, NFT technology has not only become popular among individuals but has also gained credibility and spread to large companies in South Korea. The author notes that NFT technology has been actively developed not only by private users but also by the government — and has even come under its regulation due to the rapid growth of interest in blockchain.
Cryptographics is an artwork that reflects on the recent phenomenon of cryp- to art, which involves associating digital artifacts with blockchain, tokenizing artworks with non-fungible tokens (NFTs). This practice has recently been the subject of heated debate within art and the humanities, as well as setting off a feeding frenzy by artists, digital content creators, and speculative investors. In Cryptographics, I take an artistic interpretation of this topic, highlighting the way that while tokenization is intended to make unique digital assets more eas- ily traceable, it treats content as inconsequential, raising a number of questions regarding the value of digital artworks. Working with found text fragments from discussions centered on NFTs and crypto art and existing images, the work seeks to negate the representational role of images, reducing them to mere fields of pixels. By obscuring the visual content of the images and text, this work ques- tions what impacts it may have if we are to treat all digital content as commod- ifiable, yet interchangeable.
Черкаський державний технологічний університет, Р.В. Манн, В.В. Данилевський, Черкаський державний технологічний університет · 6 authors
The analysis of the main aspects of the development of the NFT market and crypto art as components of the development of the Ukrainian economy was carried out. The trends in the implementation of cryptocurrency and NFT are analyzed to achieve new horizons in economic development. It has been proven that in order to expand the social barrier and provide access to crypto art, everyone needs to solve two problems: the limited revision of individual works and the impossibility of duplicating them so that each copy has the same value. Today, thanks to digital art, there is a chance to make crypto art truly democratic and accessible, meeting real economic needs. It has been established that thanks to the spread of new technology, artists expand their field of activity and there are more chances to increase income, and viewers will be able to enjoy a universal work. A description and analysis of the trends in modern crypto art, which are a manifestation of digital art, is given. It has been proven that the authenticity of digital art can be verified using an NFT or non-fungible token. The possibilities and limitations of the development of the NFT market are highlighted. It has been proven that the NFT market can become the engine of the modern economy, as it creates a balance between art and economics.
Tom Barbereau, Johannes Sedlmeir, Reilly Smethurst, Gilbert Fridgen · 5 authors
Abstract Art and collectibles markets tend to involve lower liquidity and higher fees than public equity markets. Distributed ledger technology can tokenize artworks and collectibles, so that claims to these assets can be exchanged digitally without intermediaries. Tokenization offers investors access to a global market plus a digitized paper trail, as well as new options for the fractional ownership of artworks, art-collateralized loans, and yield-bearing art assets. The main challenge for tokenization researchers and platform developers is to simultaneously satisfy regulators’ demands for transparency and auditability as well as art investors’ demands for privacy. New technological solutions are required that enable market participants to disclose the absolute minimum amount of information that is demanded by regulators. We investigate how distributed ledger technology, cryptography, and digital identity management can help address this challenge.
Brett Hemenway, Bin Gu, Gerry Tsoukalas, Niuniu Zhang
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are transforming how content creators, such as artists, price and sell their work. A key feature of NFTs is the inclusion of royalties, which grant creators a share of all future resale proceeds. Although widely used, critics argue that sophisticated speculators, who dominate NFT markets, simply price in royalties upfront, neutralizing their impact. We show this intuition holds only under perfect, frictionless markets. Under more realistic market conditions, royalties enable creators to capitalize on the presence of speculators in at least three ways: They can enable risk sharing (under risk aversion), mitigate information asymmetry (when speculators are better informed), and unlock price discrimination benefits (in multi-unit settings). Moreover, in all three cases, royalties meaningfully expand trade, implying increased transaction volume for platforms. These results offer testable predictions that can guide both empirical research and platform design.
We study a token-based platform where users choose between adopting the platform’s service and speculating on its native token. While both adopters and speculators earn the token’s capital gain, adopters also incur a participation cost to obtain a noisy service benefit enhanced by network effects. This tension between adoption and speculation can suppress participation, halt learning, and trigger collapse even when expected fundamentals are strong. We characterize the participation threshold, show how token-price volatility expands the collapse region, and identify the resulting learning traps. The model implies that inflation and adopter-targeted incentives support participation, whereas subsidies to speculators increase fragility.
Hossein Jahanshahloo, Felix Irresberger, Andrew Urquhart
This paper explores and describes historical on-chain transaction data recorded on the Bitcoin blockchain, constructs a panel of all individual Bitcoin users, and computes their balances in the cross-section and over time. We run clustering algorithms to combine addresses that belong to the same user into wallets and we find that using wallets over addresses as the unit of analysis allows for economically meaningful interpretations of user behavior. We identify and divide wallets into user categories - miners, exchanges, services, retail wallets and receiving-only addresses - and observe varying activity levels and balances in the cross-section and over time, corresponding to their intended role in the Bitcoin network. By matching historical transactions with minute-level price data, we estimate wallets' realized financial return and find that these user-types not only exhibit different transaction patterns and balances, but also different levels of financial performance. Our paper highlights opportunities for novel empirical research that exploits Bitcoin wallet-level data on individual user characteristics.
Social goods are difficult to study because of selection bias, as available data typically focus on successful products. The non-fungible token (NFT) market offers a rare exception, as the blockchain records every launch, success, and failure. Using comprehensive NFT data from 2021–2024, we study preference-driven herding in primary markets. Launch outcomes are sharply bimodal, demand accelerates as sellouts approach, and early participation shocks persist for months. These patterns are consistent with preference-driven coordination rather than purely informational herding. We provide further evidence consistent with social-goods models, including substantial primary-market underpricing that is exploited by scalpers.
Abstract We proxy retail investor attention through Google Trends and find that fungible and non-fungible crypto tokens generate greater attention from high-gambling propensity regions. Crypto attention is higher during bubble-like episodes in the crypto market and for more lottery-like tokens. Moreover, retail crypto attention decreases after sports gambling is legalized. Higher token attention is associated with more contributors and higher fundraising. However, consumer credit default rates spike after periods of high crypto attention, but solely in the subprime segment. Overall, our findings suggest that gambling preferences strongly predict retail investor interest in the crypto market.
Italy is distinguishing itself as one of the pioneers of crypto art and among its most important ‘producers’. If domestic blockchain technology-based industry is lacking, its applications in the field of art are fuelling a cultural awakening in the country. NFTs are pushing a sector different from the one in which the creative industry traditionally deployed, so much so that it is named ‘Crypto Renaissance’. However, the need undermines this promising opportunity for a clear regulatory framework while waiting for future EU Regulations. However, the MiCAR proposal, in its current version, excludes from its scope NFTs, leaving space for the Member States. How Italy could use this space to create a market for NFTs in Italy by reviving the lustre of the past and taking advantage of the technology’s development opportunities for the future is yet to be seen.