The non-fungible token (NFT) market has seen rapid growth, making it challenging for investors to select valuable NFT collections. Moreover, the prevalence of wash trading in NFT transactions has distorted market activity and misled investors. To address these issues, we propose a novel NFT collection recommendation mechanism based on social capital theory to support the healthy development of the NFT market. We filter wash trading and predict the trends of NFT collections. This study offers a promising approach to enhancing user experience in the NFT market and mitigating the harmful effects of wash trading on market activity.
Abstract The digital transformation of the art world has become a revolution for the sector. Cryptoart, based on non-fungible tokens (NFT), is attracting the attention of artists, collectors and enthusiasts for its ability to tokenise any element that can be sold as art in the digital market. In this way, it is able to become a scarce resource and an economic asset by encapsulating the market value of a piece of digital art, which may or may not have a reference in the real world. This study will delve into the ethical aspects underlying what is known as the NFT Revolution, particularly impacts related to the abuse or destruction of cultural heritage, speculation and the generation of economic bubbles and environmental unsustainability. To this end, this research has been carried out within the framework of a hermeneutic-critical proposal for analysing, understanding and prescribing cryptoart and its processes. This, methodology, typical of the human and social sciences, critically analyses the current context of the digital transformation of art through the study and interpretation of bibliographical sources and case studies in order to reconstruct the keys and conditions of possibility that guide its development in a fair and responsible way.
El presente trabajo busca indagar las comunidades NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens), a través del estudio de caso de la colección CryptoPunks como ensamblajes desterritorializados con una clara postura ética de descentralización de los mercados (financiero y del arte), teniendo en cuenta las interpretaciones del sentido(s) de la acción, tanto a través de teoría filosófica cercana a la comunidad Crypto como la percepción de usuarios y expertos en la materia. La investigación busca encontrar dicho sentido a través de un análisis, tanto del nivel semántico como pragmático, distinguiendo entre los discursos manifiestos y las prácticas que se llevan a cabo en la Blockchain, con particular énfasis en la red de Ethereum, para hacer énfasis en los mecanismos que permiten dicho ensamblaje. De igual manera, se espera esbozar la importancia de la interacción humano-no humano en el campo sociológico, enfocándose en las potencias de sociabilidad que son establecidas tanto semántica como pragmáticamente en los desarrollos técnicos y tecnológicos, teniendo en cuenta la pertenencia a la época actual, de creciente automatización y algoritmización de las interacciones. A manera de conclusión, encontramos que la eticidad se distribuye diferencialmente entre el momento semántico y el pragmático, pues los discursos fundacionales y los usos que llevan a cabo los coleccionistas distan en sus sentidos. Los discursos suelen argumentar a favor de la descentralización de la economía, privilegiando formas heterónomas y heterárquicas de construcción de valor y subjetividades; mientras que los usos llevados a cabo por los coleccionistas suelen ir en el sentido de maximizar inversiones que fueron puestas en los bienes digitales atados a los contratos NFT, por ende, la comunidad es sujetada en la medida en que la especulación de una colección mantenga su momento ascendente. La comunidad, gestada como un ensamblaje a partir de su motivación por la velocidad, desterritorialización y descodificación es captada por usuarios cooptados por los discursos del capital en cuanto empresario de sí, caracterizando los bienes de arte digitales como maximizadores de capital y encerrándose en un bucle similar a las prácticas bursátiles.
The Korean Society of Culture and Convergence, Shenhua Shenhua
This study suggested measures to revitalize the stagnant classic music market by utilizing the recently spotlighted non-fungible token (NFT). This study examined the replaceability based on NFT-related specialized knowledge and relevant preceding studies and utilized them to suggest the classic music market revitalization method by using preceding studies and statistics. NFT is blockchain-based exchange measure called non-fungible token. Since NFT is free from reproduction, falsification, and abuse, NFT is able to maintain its value. Furthermore, NFT is able to maintain the economic value not only physical artworks but also non-physical art values. Therefore, NFT can add economic value and revitalize the classic music market and other markets with decreasing attention. Especially, NFT is expected to protect the property rights and copyrights of classic music, create profits through streaming and other services, and boost transactions based on scarcity to expand the classic market.
Régis Barondeau, Axel Guitton, Shima Masoumi, Pablo Campos
This article examines the discourses surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in gaming and identifies companies involved in NFTs in the Quebec gaming scene. NFTs boomed in the gaming industry in 2021 and continued to grow in 2022, even as the value of gaming coins plummeted. If successful, some believe they could bring new opportunities to the gaming landscape. We conducted an online ethnography in early 2022 through an innovative web-scanning approach and curation process powered by a professional market intelligence platform. Data was collected from various sources and analyzed via statistical analysis software to understand the discourses of companies, gamers, researchers, and insiders. Findings show that the technical and economic discourse is at least ambivalent if not negative, while the gamer discourse is mostly negative. The burgeoning Quebec scene is currently very limited and divided into two groups: large gaming companies and startups. Despite the crypto-enthusiast craze, our analysis shows that early projects were often criticized by traditional gamers and that professionals in the sector remain skeptical.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have been making the news since an NFT for a piece of digital art by the artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold for $69 million in March 2021. Regulators and lawyers have been scrambling to understand the legal issues surrounding NFTs, not to mention the meaning and value proposition of this novel class of digital assets for online marketplaces and digital content developers. According to GlobeNewsWire, the global NFT market size is expected to grow from USD 3.0 billion in 2022 to USD 13.6 billion by 2027. An NFT is a unique digital asset. This chapter discusses NFTs; their characteristics; how to buy, sell, and mint NFTs; and some key legal and regulatory issues.
Cryptocurrencies can be addressed as a digital version of cash. As the physical cash (banknotes and coins), even cryptocurrencies require to be handled. The risk of loss, theft, robberies – that typically relates to the use of cash – exist even with cryptocurrencies. The chapter analyzes how the handling of cryptocurrencies is possible, introducing the concept of e-Wallet, and the functions of “public keys” and “private keys”, necessary to transfer coins between counterparts (e.g., to make or receive a payment, to buy or sell cryptocurrencies). The analysis includes the differences between “hot wallets” and “cold wallets”. In the second part, the focus is on trading platforms (exchanges) – as Binace, Coinbase, Kraken, and Gemini – and the expendability of cryptocurrencies. The reading should provide the big picture about how to buy, sell, store, and transfer cryptocurrencies.
In this digital age, the number of NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) in the market is growing, and NFT trading platforms are also emerging. However, most of the smart contracts used to manage the ownership, transaction and metadata information of NFT in the platform are different, that is, the management specifications for NFT are also different, which will prevent the sharing of NFT information in different platforms and affect the development of NFT. At the same time, as the number of NFT works continues to increase, when users search for NFTs, the platform needs to quickly and accurately locate the NFTs that users are interested in. Therefore, the platform needs a robust and efficient search system. We proposed a solution for the NFT platform, which manages the functions of registering NFT, searching NFT, and trading NFT of the NFT platform in the way of standardization task, search task, and verification task. The standardization task is used to unify the metadata information of NFT, resulting in the unified specification of NFT created by different users and platforms. The search task uses two methods of content addressing and elastic retrieval to realize the retrieval function of the platform and uses the verification task to learn user identity verification. Finally, the implementation algorithms of the different tools will be presented.
In terms of music development, dissemination, and audience interaction, the music business has seen several improvements. However, in existing music platforms, a significant flaw regarding unfair revenue distribution policy by intermediaries puts artists at disadvantage. The challenges that listeners confront include frequent interrupting ads and lower-quality features and music for various subscription packs. There is no transparency in transactions and revenue models in the existing systems. The objective of the platform is to reform income distribution practices that disfavor artists and to provide a fair share of the revenue to the artist for their work. The study looks at how blockchain technology with IPFS protocol and non-fungible tokens may be used to construct a decentralized application (dApp) that maximizes artist’s income by removing centralized authority. Additionally, users are provided with the ability to trade music NFTs and stream high-quality, uninterrupted music, at zero subscription fee.
Seonmi Kim, Y. C. Lee, Yejin Kim, Joohwan Hong · 5 authors
Recommender systems have become essential tools for enhancing user experiences across various domains. While extensive research has been conducted on recommender systems for movies, music, and e-commerce, the rapidly growing and economically significant Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market remains underexplored. The unique characteristics and increasing prominence of the NFT market highlight the importance of developing tailored recommender systems to cater to its specific needs and unlock its full potential. In this paper, we examine the distinctive characteristics of NFTs and propose the first recommender system specifically designed to address NFT market challenges. In specific, we develop a Multi-Attention Recommender System for NFTs (NFT-MARS) with three key characteristics: (1) graph attention to handle sparse user-item interactions, (2) multi-modal attention to incorporate feature preference of users, and (3) multi-task learning to consider the dual nature of NFTs as both artwork and financial assets. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NFT-MARS compared to various baseline models using the actual transaction data of NFTs collected directly from blockchain for four of the most popular NFT collections. The source code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/RecSys2023-93ED.
Copyright law safeguards the exclusive rights of authors to their intellectual creations, emphasizing reproduction, public display, and adaptation. A fundamental distinction within this realm is between the intangible creative work and its tangible representations. Owning a tangible embodiment (like a painting) does not grant rights to reproduce the intellectual work it embodies. This demarcation is critical in the dynamic landscape of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as acquiring an NFT does not automatically confer rights to the associated work. Instead, rights hinge on explicit contractual terms accompanying the NFT transaction. As the world of NFTs continues to unfold in all sorts of directions, delving deep into the intricacies of copyright law is important for artists, investors, and legal practitioners navigating the digital frontier. This chapter offers insights into the various copyright implications associated with NFTs.
Abstract Over the past two years non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become a highly popular, though extremely volatile trade asset. As mere data sets on the blockchain, NFTs are challenging the law to define the legal positions they entail. This article examines NFTs from the angle of copyright licensing, looking at it from a European perspective with the main focus on German law. Based on the technical specifics of NFTs, the paper evaluates the relevant legal position required for a permitted use of tokenized copyrighted content and how such a position may be obtained in the context of NFT trading. A review of the copyright schemes of 21 of the most sought-after NFT collections sets out the current state of licensing and identifies the prevailing legal uncertainties. The fact that these are not merely theoretical is then shown by the turbulent case of a ‘stolen’ ape avatar, tokenized by an NFT, that was set to star in a live-action animated series.
Before a good can be purchased, it must be understood who has the authority to sell it, and once a purchase has been made, ownership must be transferred from the seller to the purchaser. The solution provided by NFTs allows parties to agree on a common agreement i.e., smart contract of what constitutes ownership. Digital artists truly faced many problems in the ownership and credit of their artworks in fast growing digital world. They are worried about conducting online exhibitions of their artworks because it can be easily forged or replicated by someone. The same problems apply to real-world works of art, although things are a bit simpler when it comes to determining their authenticity. Blockchain is a revolutionary technology and will have great positive effects in our business environment soon. NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. An NFT can be considered just a digital form of real-world entities. They are traded online, generally with different types of cryptocurrencies.
Non-fungible token (NFT) is a tradable unit of data stored on the blockchain which can be associated with some digital asset as a certification of ownership. The past several years have witnessed the exponential growth of the NFT market. In 2021, the NFT market reached its peak with more than $40 billion trades. Despite the booming NFT market, most NFT-related studies focus on its technical aspect, such as standards, protocols, and security, while our study aims at developing a pioneering recommender system for NFT buyers. In this paper, we introduce an extreme deep factorization machine (xDeepFM)-based recommender system, NFT.mine, which achieves real-time data collection, data cleaning, feature extraction, training, and inference. We used data from OpenSea, the most influential NFT trading platform, to testify the performance of NFT.mine. As a result, experiments showed that compared to traditional models such as logistic regression, naive Bayes, random forest, etc., NFT.mine outperforms them with higher AUC and lower cross entropy loss and outputs personalized recommendations for NFT buyers.
Purpose This study reviews existing cryptocurrency research to provide answers to three puzzles in the literature. First, is cryptocurrency more like gold (i.e., a commodity) or should it be classified as a new financial asset? Second, can we apply our knowledge of the traditional capital market to the emerging cryptocurrency market? Third, what might be the future of cryptocurrency? Design/methodology/approach Bibliometric analysis is used to assess 2,098 finance-related cryptocurrency publications from the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection database from January 2009 to April 2022. Three key research streams are identified, namely, (1) cryptocurrency features, (2) behaviour of the cryptocurrency market and (3) blockchain implications. Findings First, cryptocurrency should be viewed and regulated as a new asset class rather than a currency or a new commodity. While it can provide diversification benefits to the portfolio, cryptocurrency cannot work as a safe haven asset. Second, crypto markets are typically inefficient. Asset bubbles exist and are exacerbated by behavioural finance factors. Third, cryptocurrency demonstrates increasing potential as a medium of exchange and store of value. Originality/value Extant review papers primarily study one or two particular research topics, overlooking the interaction between topics. The few existing systematic literature reviews in this area typically have a narrow focus on trend identification. This study is the first study to provide a comprehensive review of all financial-related studies on cryptocurrency, synthesising the research findings from 2,098 publications to answer three cryptocurrency puzzles.
Among the earliest projects to combine the Meta-verse and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) we find Decentraland, a blockchain-based virtual world that touts itself as the first to be owned by its users. In particular, the platform’s virtual wearables (which allow avatar appearance customization) have attracted much attention from users, content creators, and the fashion industry. In this work, we present the first study to quantitatively characterize Decentraland’s wearables, their publication, minting, and sales on the platform’s marketplace. Our results indicate that wearables are mostly given away to promote and increase engagement on other cryptoasset or Metaverse projects, and only a small fraction is sold on the platform’s marketplace, where the price is mainly driven by the preset wearable’s rarity. Hence, platforms that offer virtual wearable NFTs should pay particular attention to the economics around this kind of assets beyond their mere sale.
Ayesha Kalhoro, Asif Ali Wagan, Abdullah Ayub Khan, Jim‐Min Lin · 7 authors
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are individual tokens with valuable information stored inside them over blockchain technology. They can be purchased and sold like other physical and virtual art pieces because their worth is mostly determined by the market and demand. The unique data of NFTs render it simple to verify and authenticate their ownership and transfer of tokens between owners. However, in Pakistan, developers cannot acquire different licences to accomplish their projects not because they cannot afford it, but because they cannot invest in every piece of software to accomplish each new sensitive task. Rather, they can render the product platform independent. Considering this technology, this paper provides IT professionals with a new NFT approach and business policies that solely belong to the information technology domain. In addition, this paper also introduces how NFT tokens can hold software applications. Since we can store files, we can let NFTs also store complete applications to help developers in further utilising virtuality and having the metaverse at their fingertips. Whenever they succeed in a project, they never receive rewards, and their skills only pay the bills. In a nutshell, this paper presents a prototype of NFTs that would be further polished to save and utilise applications in a decentralised manner while rewarding the developers.
The Non-Fungible-Token (NFT) market has experienced explosive growth in recent years. According to DappRadar, the total transaction volume on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, reached 34.7 billion dollars in February 2023. However, the NFT market is mostly unregulated and there are significant concerns about money laundering, fraud and wash trading. The lack of industry-wide regulations, and the fact that amateur traders and retail investors comprise a significant fraction of the NFT market, make this market particularly vulnerable to fraudulent activities. Therefore it is essential to investigate and highlight the relevant risks involved in NFT trading. In this paper, we attempted to uncover common fraudulent behaviors such as wash trading that could mislead other traders. Using market data, we designed quantitative features from the network, monetary, and temporal perspectives that were fed into K-means clustering unsupervised learning algorithm to sort traders into groups. Lastly, we discussed the clustering results' significance and how regulations can reduce undesired behaviors. Our work can potentially help regulators narrow down their search space for bad actors in the market as well as provide insights for amateur traders to protect themselves from unforeseen frauds.
This chapter examines characteristics of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and factors of perceived consumer value that influence the intention to purchase NFT sports collectibles. It further offers recommendations through which NFT experiences can be enhanced for collectors. The role of NFT sports collectibles is introduced in the context of the internet of things and internet of value before defining NFT characteristics and consumer value factors relevant to this study. The respective conceptual model is then analyzed and discussed. The main findings explain that NFT characteristics including scarcity, uniqueness, aesthetics, and functional utility have no direct effect on the purchase intention for NFT sports collectibles. However, they have a significant and positive influence on the purchase intention when mediated through consumer values like the enjoyment of collecting NFTs, the creativity stimulated from assembling a digital collection, and the social relationships that can be fostered with other collectors.
Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification
Mohammad Aaris Amirza, Mohamed Razeef Abdul Razak, Muhamad Fairus Kamaruzaman, Rusmadiah Anwar
The world has been discussing non-fungible tokens (NFT) and this abbreviation is the most searched topic via Google which received widespread attention in 2021. This NFT phenomenon has made the conversion of traditional art into crypto art which also led to the emergence of marketplaces based on the NFT. Rising numbers of users and local NFT marketplaces is somehow an indication of the reception of Malaysia towards the NFT. This paper is to first identify the status-quo of NFT and tokenization in the creative arts in Malaysia since its emergence and, secondly, the potential of this emerging technology carries. The study finds that there are number of local creative talents and brands has started to tokenised their artworks and gained success with their NFT projects. Despite Malaysia having a low percentage of NFT owners, demand in NFT is increasing as the potentials of this advancement has would contribute to the encouragement towards the Metaverse. This research concludes that as more users, brands, and organisations are beginning to create their own NFT collections to not only advertise their brands but also to begin utilising this new technology as they keep pace with other international NFT users, Malaysia’s NFT market is still in its infancy and must be explore.
With the proliferation of the Internet, particularly the rise of social media, digital images have gradually become an important part of life, and trading platforms have emerged for buying and selling images. However, traditional image trading service providers may disclose users' private information for profit. Additionally, many image trading platforms disregard the fairness of a transaction and the issue of copyright protection after an image is sold. This neglect harms the interests of users and affects their enthusiasm for trading. A secure way to safely transact images is needed. We proposed a copyright-preserving and fair image trading scheme based on blockchain, which combines amplifying locality-sensitive hashing with searchable symmetric encryption to achieve safe image retrieval on blockchain and ensure the credibility of the image retrieval process. Additionally, we use digital fingerprint and watermark technologies to realize the copyright protection of images and use smart contracts to achieve fair transaction processes. The experimental results show that our scheme can protect image copyrights and realize a fair trading process while ensuring efficiency.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
In 2021, the concept of NFTs gained worldwide attention when a digital artist known as ‘Beeple’ sold his work Everydays: The First 5000 Days for 69 million US dollars at Christie’s, placing him among the top three living artists by sale value (Kastrenakes 2021). Since then, “non-fungible token” (or “NFT”) has rapidly become a high-scoring term on Google Trends and there has been corresponding growth in the number of artists, collectors, and platforms dealing with NFTs.Because of the many NFT platforms, the enormous volume of NFTs, the involvement of various cryptocurrencies, the fluctuating prices, and unpredictability of trends, navigating the NFT art market is very complicated. In an attempt to engage in this new sphere of speculation (and to speculate about it), we opened a physical NFT Shop at an abandoned gas station. Besides NFT art, we offered conversation and warm coffee to visitors. Surprisingly, we found almost everyone we met had heard about NFTs, although few demonstrated any in-depth knowledge. Our NFT Shop was expressly concerned with displaying only ‘clean’ NFTs, thereby underlining the environmental impact of typical blockchain technology. Tezos, a cryptocurrency known as a clean and eco-friendly ‘crypto’, is gaining popularity in the NFT art market as an alternative to Ethereum, which has a high carbon footprint (McDonald 2021) and high minting cost. According to Memo Akten’s A guide to eco-friendly CryptoArt, the cost of transactions in Ethereum fluctuates between $100-$1000 (Akten 2021), which is in stark contrast to Tezos, where exchange fees are currently below a dollar. The high energy consumption of blockchain has generated strong opposition, especially among artists. Thus, many alternative NFT platforms such as objkt and fx(hash) use Tezos and brand themselves as an eco-friendly and affordable marketplaces.Despite the availability of relatively clean cryptos, many digital artists prefer not to be associated with CryptoArt of any kind. At the same time, the general audience for art largely assumes that all digital art is NFT art. From the perspective of digital artists, it is difficult to say whether NFTs are a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, the art market has become receptive to digital formats, so many artists now have the opportunity to make a living from their art. On the other hand, there remains much that seems ‘unclean’ about NFT markets, although all transactions are entirely transparent. In this context, this paper and our art project NFT Shop aim to offer a framework for making sense of the NFT marketplaces and thus help to demystify the concepts of NFT and related platforms.
Clearly, digital technologies have been developed rapidly, and it affects art form significantly. For instance, visual works, where were displayed and sold in the art galleries have shifted into the blockchain networks nowadays. As a result, it makes NFT (Non-Fungible Token) becoming extremely popular, mainly in Generation-Z. This study aims to discuss how visual communication design students as a part of Gen-Z are introduced to the world of NFT as a visual archiving solution through the art history learning method in Bina Nusantara University. In addition, this study sees to what extent art history could be implied in the NFT art in order to attract Gen-Z to learn history and gaining analytical and critical ability. In order to design a historical NFT art, first, students should be able to understand the cultural concepts that exist in each particular era, from the mindset, characteristics, to the main essence of that period. From the analysis of previous artefacts and any great relics that were exist, students are capable to express their thoughts about the certain culture and providing conclusions from each era they adopt. Through this process, a historical NFT art that emphasize the origin meaning in the past and executed through visuals that tailored to the needs of Gen-Z would be successfully achieved. To sum up, this study found that even digital assets could not be separated from enculturation and history.