Promoters of art-oriented non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and online NFT auction houses like Foundation, OpenSea, and SuperRare claim to be ârevolutionizingâ and âdemocratizingâ the worlds of art and art collecting by deploying blockchain technology to track sales and purchases and thereby eliminating the threats of transactional opacity and fraud that have long plagued art markets. This article complicates such claims by arguing that with NFTs, the usual clamoring for authenticity in art becomes so abstract that only code remains, as the aesthetic object becomes effectively indistinct from the account of its provenance and transaction history. An NFT, like a financial derivative, has no necessary or representational relationship with any actual underlying object. The artwork associated with the token is, rather, prised apart from its existence as property and finds its use not in being seen or felt, but in the truth of its copyability. Looking beyond the NFTs themselves, this article interrogates the discourses promulgating this trend. Comment threads in Reddit and Discord groups, for example, do much to channel the libidinal energy elicited by an artwork, while the digital token itself generates an acquisitive enthusiasm wholly apart from the sensation of seeing or hearing the associated work. Despite fronting radical social change, NFTs ultimately reinforce traditional forms of property and ownership, exhibit reactionary aesthetic and cultural values, and anticipate increasingly authoritarian modes of social control. Taking a wider view, I consider ours an age of post-information, wherein, contrary to Batesonâs classic definition of information in terms of a doubled difference, we find data-based artifacts like NFTs (following cryptocurrency) to be increasingly productive of widespread social and political indifference, a perpetuation of sameness, and an augmentation of the narcissistic ego. In this case: data as the afterlife of art.
Ilan Alon, Vanessa Pilla Galetti Bretas, Villi Katrih
This article aims to broaden the understanding of the non-fungible tokens (NFTs) pricing determinants by investigating features, both market- and network-related aspects. NFTs are uniquely identifiable digital assets stored on the blockchain. Ownership is assigned through smart contracts and can be transferred or resold by the owner. The authors analyzed a comprehensive dataset from Signex.io with over 19,183 datapoints on NFT prices and NFT social communities using automated machine learning (AML), a suitable technique to investigate the most impactful factors due to a lack of knowledge on the exact determinants. Findings show that network factors are the most important pricing determinants: Twitter members followed by Discord members. Online communities drive the price of NFTs, but not in a linear fashion. Given the newness of the phenomenon and no agreed upon pricing models, this article contributes by using AML to discover the most relevant determinants of non-fungible tokens (NFT) prices.
Currently, the best known applications of blockchain technology are finance and art. In particular, the blockchain art market, born in early 2018 without fuss, went parabolic around 2021, also thanks to record-breaking sales of digital artworks associated with a Non-Fungible Token (NFT), mediated by the grand dames of auction houses Christieâs and Sothebyâs. In this contribution we merge art and finance on blockchain and explore the opportunity of buying blockchain art as a financial investment. While there exists a relatively large literature on traditional art as investment, the topic of investing in NFTs is still in its infancy. Thus, we provide methods (metrics) and tools (a Web app) to reason about opportunities, in terms of risks and returns, of investing in art on chain.
Three years after the sensational debut of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on the art scene, it seems timely to reflect on their presumed revolutionary attributes. The speculative fascination at the beginning has gradually given way to mixed outcomes, with hardly predictable future directions. However, once recontextualized in the art ecosystem and its value chain, one may question the ability of NFT technology to lead to radical changes. Our main argument is that although they offer perspectives that are worth considering regarding contracts, authorsâ rights management, and provenance, blockchain-based technologies do not substantially modify the typical characteristics of the art world. Based on recent press articles and academic publications, we comment on the effects of this technology on producers (artistsâ creative process and career development), intermediaries (art market gatekeepers), and consumers (quest for authenticity, collecting habits, and museum intervention in the art market). Our main conclusions suggest that NFTs perpetuate oversupply and job precarity in cyberenvironments and reinforce existing purchasing behaviors driven by the quest for authenticity and conspicuous consumption. Our goal is to mitigate some statements found in the literature and the press, especially regarding the democratization of the art market, and to help art market stakeholders approach this technology most objectively.
In recent years, due to the slowdown of the global economy and the instability of the stock market and real estate market, the art market has gradually become the third-largest investment market after the former two. As more and more funds flow into the art market, the two seemingly unrelated industries, art, and finance have increasingly close cooperation due to the growing prosperity of the art market. As a very important part of the process of art financialization, the development of art banks has also received extensive attention from all walks of life. In addition, blockchain, as a technology to jointly maintain reliable databases through trustlessness and decentralization, has grown rapidly in recent years, and is gradually applied in various fields. The advantages of blockchain technology are decentralization, anonymity, immutability, and traceability of stored information. The proposed scheme applies the characteristics of blockchain technology to Art Bankâs art rental system, and will have the following advantages: the use of Hyperledger technology, various art banks being merged into an alliance, and information among alliance members being shared, which is convenient for tenants to comprehensively query a single item. Using blockchain technology, in an environment where there is no central authority, under the premise of preventing the tampering of artwork-related information, ensures that the detailed information of the artwork is shared. Traditional leasing agreements can be compiled into smart contract leasing contracts to automatically run and manipulate data. The proposed protocol satisfies the following security requirements: identitiesâ mutual authentication, non-repudiation between every two parties, and other major security requirements based on blockchain. When a dispute arises, our proposed scheme also has an arbitration mechanism to clarify responsibilities.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are non-interchangeable assets, usually digital art, which are stored on the blockchain. Preliminary studies find that female and darker-skinned NFTs are valued less than their male and lighter-skinned counterparts. However, these studies analyze only the CryptoPunks collection. We test the statistical significance of race and gender biases in the prices of CryptoPunks and present the first study of gender bias in the broader NFT market. We find evidence of racial bias but not gender bias. Our work also introduces a dataset of gender-labeled NFT collections to advance the broader study of social equity in this emerging market.
NFTs are non-fungible, one-of-a-kind digital assets that are enabled by blockchain technology. Digital encrypted assets known as non-fungible tokens are one-of-a-kind, rare, and impossible to duplicate. A greater variety of use cases, including as digital art, domain names, gaming, collectibles, and others, have been observed recently for NFTs. On a blockchain, like Ethereum, NFTs are created (i.e., minted), and they can be used to confirm ownership of an asset (where it came from, who is the owner, etc.). Data from a joint analysis by Nonfungible.com and L' Atelier BNP Paribas indicates that 2020 In 2018, the overall market value of the NFT market was around $ 338,035,012 with an annual growth rate of 299%. This excludes wash trading and abandoned projects. Some NFTs cost millions of dollars, which is quite expensive. How can the value of NFTs be fairly honestly evaluated is a common question. Let's analyze the history of NFT's evolution before responding to this query.
The non-fungible token (NFT) is an emergent type of cryptocurrency that has garnered extensive attention since its inception. The uniqueness, indivisibility and humanistic value of NFTs are the key characteristics that distinguish them from traditional tokens. The market capitalization of NFT reached 21.5 billion USD in 2021, almost 200 times of all previous transactions. However, the subsequent rapid decline in NFT market fever in the second quarter of 2022 casts doubts on the ostensible boom in the NFT market. To date, there has been no comprehensive and systematic study of the NFT trade market or of the NFT bubble and hype phenomenon. To fill this gap, we conduct an in-depth investigation of the whole Ethereum ERC721 and ERC1155 NFT ecosystem via graph analysis and apply several metrics to measure the characteristics of NFTs. By collecting data from the whole blockchain, we construct three graphs, namely NFT create graph, NFT transfer graph, and NFT hold graph, to characterize the NFT traders, analyze the characteristics of NFTs, and discover many observations and insights. Moreover, we propose new indicators to quantify the activeness and value of NFT and propose an algorithm that combines indicators and graph analyses to find bubble NFTs. Real-world cases demonstrate that our indicators and approach can be used to discern bubble NFTs effectively.
Abstract This study investigates how exposure to local prices changes the transaction utility of international tourists, and the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the use of cryptocurrency in these changes. Findings indicate that touristsâ transaction utility did not vary all that much when they visited a country with comparable PPP to their own. Meanwhile, when traveling to countries with a lower PPP, tourists enjoy a heightened transaction utility. Furthermore, using Bitcoin results in greater transaction utility than using fiat currency.
Jan 1, 2023·Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Economic Management and Model Engineering, ICEMME 2022, November 18-20, 2022, Nanjing, China
Since cryptocurrency went viral, it has been a profound question about how to evaluate the price value for this special currency. On account of the attributes of cryptocurrency, the factors that would be considered are different from traditional stock in asset pricing. This paper introduces four mod
Sneakers were designated as the most counterfeited fashion item online, with three times more risk in a trade than any other fashion purchase. As the market expands, the current sneaker scene displays several vulnerabilities and trust flaws, mostly related to the legitimacy of assets or actors. In this paper, we investigate various blockchain-based mechanisms to address these large-scale trust issues. We argue that (i) pre-certified and tracked assets through the use of non-fungible tokens can ensure the genuine nature of an asset and authenticate its owner more effectively during peer-to-peer trading across a marketplace; (ii) a game-theoretic-based system with economic incentives for participating users can greatly reduce the rate of online fraud and address missed delivery deadlines; (iii) a decentralized dispute resolution system biased in favour of an honest party can solve potential conflicts more reliably.
As a result of technological innovations, digital opportunities vary greatly with the transition to a different lifestyle due to the insignificance of distances at both time and international level. The treatment of a digital resource in the form of value is generally seen as an element of the perception of social values created by individuals and rare resources that are approved and manufactured in so realistic lanes and at the same time do not have the possibility of change. This article, with the qualitative research method, the production system, method, platforms, and value system of unique assets that cannot be exchanged, known as Non-Fungible Token (NFT), as well as crypto art, is investigated in the reproduction of the work of art with technical possibilities and Non-Fungible Token (NFT) in the global art market.
Fabian E. Eska, Yanghua Shi, Erik Theissen, Marliese UhrigâHomburg
Abstract We analyze whether the design of cryptocurrencies helps to explain the Huge cross-sectional variation in the market values of cryptocurrencies. We propose a taxonomy of design features and Hand-collect data on these features for a sample of 79 cryptocurrencies. Using a two-stage regression approach and LASSO regressions, we find, inter alia, that forks and deviations from the design of Bitcoin are associated with lower valuation. In contrast, non-anonymous cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrencies that do not pass on any transaction fees and/or tips to agents who maintain the integrity of the network have, on average, higher market values. These results are robust to variations in the way we measure market valuation.