In the past few years, the world has witnessed a massive development in the digital world, which has led to the emergence of a new advanced trading technology called Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) as digital crypto assets using blockchain technology. This technology has expanded and developed by leaps and bounds in various aspects of the digital world, including virtual reality and cryptocurrency. This rapid development has created a marketplace that allows users to create, buy and sell their own unique NFT digital assets quickly and easily compared to the real world while maintaining ownership rights. The huge trading market of NFTs and their remarkable technical advantages have attracted Attention and concerns of musicians, artists, collectors and gamers to such an extent that it has sparked interest in studying the applicability of NFT technology in various sectors of the real world. This research came to study the applicability of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and their opportunities and challenges in the publishing industry, taking into consideration all its stakeholders, in order to open doors for this industry, and maybe to other potential non-digital (real) industries to benefit from it.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The combination of non-fungible token (NFT) with paintings, music, games, videos and other forms of creative content is an innovation to protect the copyright of authors. It digitizes physical works with unique labels. At present, the NFT industry is blooming in the area of digital collections in China, attracting increasingly more artists, art collectors and platform enterprises to interact. However, the NFT digital collection platform is facing challenges and growth limitations. This study adopts the theory framework of responsible innovation. Through semi-structured interview and secondary document review, it analyzes the positive and negative effects of China’s NFT digital collections alongside technological, economical, ethical and social dimensions. The paper proposes four development paths to achieve responsible innovation of this emerging new business. Further discussion links NFT with open innovation dynamics, alongside areas for future research.
The efforts and talents of Nigerian creative artists have not turned into proportionate economic benefits. However, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) and their marketplaces are causing a revolution in the gaming, literature, art and music industries. Despite these opportunities, NFTs hold, of concern is the effectiveness, awareness and risks it poses to Nigerian visual art stakeholders. Through a triangular method, data was collected, analysed and discussed utilising media economics and the diffusion of innovation theories. A total of 28 stakeholders, predominantly artists, including art collectors and copyright regulators, showed that early adopters in Nigeria consider NFT marketplaces for showcasing and selling digital artworks. Notwithstanding, this trust is not seen when it comes to copyright-ability. The study also showcases various policy, structural and economic issues limiting Nigerian art space besides technology adoption. Nigerian creatives must keep an eye on the evolution of NFTs to aid their sustainable growth. Although pirated creative works have been sold on the streets of Nigeria over the years, NFTs can help Nigerian creatives earn on the streets of the metaverse.
As the rules for countering money laundering constantly change, criminals find new methods and platforms to launder their “dirty” money. Recently, such new platforms have included the art market and the use of crypto currencies. Subsequently, both of these sectors were added to the list of sectors susceptible to facilitate money laundering. Apart from the traditional art market, criminals may use digital art in order to facilitate their activities. The rise of the digital art market with the expansion of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) is a new area of concern for law enforcement agencies. Anonymity and price volatility of NFTs create a unique and exploitable environment for criminals. The complex nature and uncertain legal status of NFTs further complicate the counter measures one can take. This paper explains what NFTs are, analyses their relation to money laundering risks and scrutinises their legal status in the EU. In doing so, it identifies gaps in the law and training needs of law enforcement agencies. Finally, the paper provides potential solutions and recommendations in relation to these gaps. The paper offers a novel study on NFTs and aims to pave the way for further comparative studies related to NFTs.
Blockchain has become a trend in the last few years due to its financial impact correlated to Cryptocurrency. Blockchain is a distributed, immutable, and decentralized database to store transactions which are done by users without the need for a trusted Third-party. Similar to cryptocurrency, tokens are objects that Represent digital or physical assets over a Blockchain network. Token market value has been dramatically increasing in the last few years due to The breakthrough that was made in preserving intellectual property And the usage in many other fields like tourism, education, and Art. Non- Fungible tokens (NFT) Are unique and exchangeable tokens because they are different in type and value due to their scarcity. Using NFT to manage the educational assets will be an effective way to protect the intellectual property and the educational assets from fraud. In this paper, we propose a NFT-based framework to manage the educational assets on the Metaverse that authenticate the ownership of the assets using Blockchain technology. We also explain the minting process we used to convert the assets into NFT in the framework.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are crypto assets with a unique digital identifier for ownership, powered by blockchain technology. Technically speaking, anything digital could be minted and sold as an NFT, which provides proof of ownership and authenticity of a digital file. For this reason, it helps us distinguish between the originals and their copies, making it possible to trade them. This paper focuses on art NFTs that change how artists can sell their products. It also changes how the art trade market works since NFT technology cuts out the middleman. Recently, the utility of NFTs has become an essential issue in the NFT ecosystem, which refers to the owners' usefulness, profitability, and benefits. Using recent major art NFT marketplace datasets, we summarize and interpret the current market trends and patterns in a way that brings insight into the future art market. Numerical examples are presented.
Historic landmarks, antiquities, and museums showcase the area’s culture and history [4]. Archaeologists suffer from stolen items sold illegally, and many museums reject pieces from unknown sources and locations due to laws and ethics; as a result, many artifacts are destroyed and their identity is lost [4, 5]. Cutting-edge technology is one way to preserve our cultural heritage for future generations. The study’s findings improve the use of blockchain technology for cultural preservation, benefiting both public museum collections and private collections.Collectors can register their objects with unique serial numbers to trace them in museums and using smart contracts. Since its inception in October 2008 as part of an initiative called Bitcoin to create peer-to-peer money independent of lenders, Bitcoin has introduced strategies to help solve the problem of human trust in aging, core (blockchain) technology enables us to trust the system’s outputs without the ratification of a particular actor inside, and the information is permanently secured. To avoid these concerns, we proposed a blockchain-based artifacts storage and trade system.
In May 2021, Chinese government issued a series of policies to strengthen the supervision of cryptocurrency market. Based on the principle of event study and combing of Chinese and American cryptocurrency policies, this paper selects May 18 as the event announcement day and constant mean return models are constructed to measure the abnormal returns of top ten market value coins. It is found that the strengthening of regulatory policies had an evidently negative influence on the market. Combined with the analysis of the features of typical cryptocurrencies, this paper figures out that on the whole there is a strong correlation between the abnormal returns of currencies in the cryptocurrency market. At the same time, by analyzing the performance of daily abnormal returns of Bitcoin and Ether in the event window, this study draws a conclusion that investors in that market have patent speculativeness. In addition, complimentary survey on stable coin is also done to verify the overall policy impact, which indicates that the market value fluctuation of stable coin is consistent with the abnormal return changes of the whole market. On this basis, through information query and literature reference, this paper also forecasts the evolution trend of regulatory policies in various countries and the development of the overall cryptocurrency market by period.
Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a relatively new concept that has been a hot topic in the development of the field. The artwork generated in the form of NFT has made it an increasingly lucrative market, while there is also a lot of interest in the application of NFT to games, the metaverse and the financial economy. Therefore, this research paper will investigate the market development trend of NFT in the context of metaverse and the future outlook, especially to make a more detailed analysis of several important fields, taking art and branding industry as examples. Based on case studies and data analysis, NFT’s high pricing is attributed to a variety of factors, where the company's marketing approach is mostly creative and cross-pollinated to appeal to a wide audience. NFT has the ability to grow in the cultural sector as a whole, but it is challenging to sustain long-term prosperity due to the lack of NFT artworks and the likelihood of excessive speculation. Overall, this paper explores the value and potential of NFT using current research and accurate statistics, particularly in the areas of branding and the arts. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of NFT's market prospect and its own value realization.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are digital assets stored on a blockchain representing real-world objects such as art or collectibles. An NFT collection comprises numerous tokens; each token can be transacted multiple times. It is a multibillion-dollar market where the number of collections has more than doubled in 2022. In this paper, we want to obtain a generative model that, given the early transactions history (first quarter Q1) of a newly minted collection, generates subsequent transactions (quarters Q2, Q3, Q4), where the generative model is trained using the transaction history of a few mature collections. The goal is to use the generated transactions to project the potential market value of this newly minted collection over the next few quarters. A technical challenge exists in that different collections have diverse characteristics, and the generative model should generate based on the appropriate "contexts" of the collection. Our method takes a two-step approach. First, it employs unsupervised learning on the early transactions to extract characteristics (which we call contexts) of NFT collections. Next, it generates future transactions of each token based on these contexts and the early transactions, projecting the target collection's potential market value. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate our contextual generative approach's NFT projection capabilities.
Khoula Al Harthy, Aparna Agarwal, Vikas Rao Naidu, Fatma Al Shuhaimi
The smart technologies include artificial intelligent solutions (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain technology. These are the trending technologies which are emerging in different sectors and domains. Many initiatives have been supported in this regard. This research paper is focusing on a solution using one of these trending technologies which is Blockchain Technology. The artists are worried about thefts related to their artwork or their designs. However, at the same time they want to share their work on digital media for recognition. In such cases it is difficult to trace who is sharing or replicating their work without recognizing them or their original creations and ownership. This paper proposes a solution to maintain artists work ownership and copyright through applying non-fungible tokens (NFT) via blockchain technology. It is a unique token generated on the Blockchain. These tokens are not replaceable. These tokens can be generated for any digital drawing, music composition/lyrics, videos, Artworks, Tweets, GIFs, Pets, Domain names etc. The framework of the market platform has been proposed here implements NFT using Blockchain. Blockchain and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are cryptographically unique, rare, non-replicable digital assets established through smart contracts, are provably digital collectible assets, according to this study. Our goal is also to provide a taxonomy for NFTs, review NFT platforms, explore technical issues as well as recent progress in addressing them.
NFTs, non-fungible tokens, can represent ownership of unique things based on a relatively new technology of blockchain (ethereum.org). Because of this mechanism, people use NFTs to sell, share and transfer various rights of digital media or tangible objects. Generally, museums, which tend to be risk-averse, are slow to examine or utilize NFTs. This paper discusses the current use cases of NFTs in the museum sector addressing both benefits and challenges that come with museum NFT use to answer how NFTs can be better utilized in the future. Despite a number of challenges, NFTs are untapped resources that could have a wider application for museums. Using the theory of the commons, this paper further develops a model for a common pool of NFT sharing based on the fair use doctrine of copyright and open access model among global museums that are willing to participate, where they can share their NFT collections digitally.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have recently surged to mainstream attention by allowing the exchange of digital assets via blockchains. NFTs have also been adopted by artists to sell digital art. One of the promises of NFTs is broadening participation to the art market, a traditionally closed and opaque system, to sustain a wider and more diverse set of artists and collectors. A key sign of this effect would be the disappearance or at least reduction in importance of seller-buyer preferential ties, whereby the success of an artist is strongly dependent on the patronage of a single collector. We investigate NFT art seller-buyer networks considering several galleries and a large set of nearly 40,000 sales for over 230 M USD in total volume. We find that NFT art is a highly concentrated market driven by few successful sellers and even fewer systematic buyers. High concentration is present in both the number of sales and, even more strongly, in their priced volume. Furthermore, we show that, while a broader-participation market was present in the early phase of NFT art adoption, preferential ties have dominated during market growth, peak and recent decline. We consistently find that the top buyer accounts on average for over 80% of buys for a given seller. Similar trends apply to buyers and their top seller. We conclude that NFT art constitutes, at the present, a highly concentrated market driven by preferential seller-buyer ties.
Rarity is known to be a factor in the price of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Most investors make their purchasing decisions based on the rarity score or rarity rank of NFTs. However, not all rare NFTs are associated with a higher price, especially for play-to-earn gaming NFTs. In this paper, we studied the top-ranked play-to-earn gaming NFTs on Axie Infinity. We found that, in addition to rarity, utility is also a significant factor influencing the price. Furthermore, we use utility as a predictor to predict the price of Axies using the XGBoost regressor. Our results reveal that, compared to using rarity-based predictors only, leveraging utility-based predictors can improve the prediction accuracy, thus highlighting utility as a price determinant for play-to-earn gaming NFTs.
NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) refer to digital assets in the form of art, game items and other collectibles that are encoded in smart contracts on blockchain. Starting from 2021, the NFT market has been growing exponentially. However, the overall structures, evolutions and trends of the market have not been sufficiently explored. In this study, we analyze data of 9,045 NFTs which were on sale at OpenSea in April 2021 and predict their price using both visual and non-visual information by a two-stage machine learning approach and an end-to-end deep learning approach. To examine the effectiveness of multimodality, models trained on unimodal and multimodal data are compared. Besides, the effect of different feature fusion techniques on model performance is analyzed. To identify important predictors, the top ten most influential features are also presented. Results show that among two-stage models, the VGG-RF model trained on multimodal data gives the best performance of R squared 69.75% and RMSE 565.49. Among end-to-end models, the multimodal neural network with self and cross-attention achieves the best performance of R squared 69.25 % and RMSE 569.13. Our results also demonstrate that the visual aspect of NFT have an impact on its price, but this impact is weaker than some non-visual information such as total number of bids in history and the collection the NFT comes from. We expect findings of this study facilitate future researches on NFT trading and pricing strategies, and help investors make more advisable investment decisions.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), digital certificates of ownership for virtual art, have until recently been traded on a highly lucrative and speculative market. Yet, an emergence of misconceptions, along with a sustained market downtime, are calling the value of NFTs into question. This project (1) describes three properties that any valuable NFT should possess (permanence, immutability and uniqueness), (2) creates a quantitative summary of permanence as an initial criteria, and (3) tests our measures on 6 months of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, finding 45% of ERC721 tokens in our corpus do not satisfy this initial criteria. Our work could help buyers and marketplaces identify and warn users against purchasing NFTs that may be overvalued.
An explosion of interest in Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) has led to the emergence of vibrant online marketplaces that enable users to buy, sell and create digital assets. Largely considered contractual representations of digital artworks, NFTs allow ownership and authenticity to be proven through storing an asset and its associated metadata on a Blockchain. Yet, variation exists between chains, token protocols (such as the ERC-721 NFT standard) and marketplaces, leading to inconsistencies in the definitions and roles of token metadata. This research thus aims to define metadata in the context of NFTs, explore the boundary of metadata and asset data within tokens, and understand the variances and impacts these structures have on the curation of NFTs within online marketplaces and collections.
Non Fungible tokens (NFTs) are receiving unprecedented attention among digital creators and traders. This technology allows creators to certify their digital assets on blockchain as a decentralized, immutable, and transparent database. They can transfer the ownership of NFTs, which can easily be traced without the risk of manipulation. The trading volume for NFTs has surged to $10 billion in the third quarter of 2021. Although the high complexity of the consensus algorithm in blockchain ensures better security, it imposes higher transaction costs and limited scalability. To alleviate high transaction fees, energy inefficiency, and delays, tens of public blockchain platforms with different consensus protocols are being proposed as alternatives for NFT marketplaces. A crucial design choice for such an NFT marketplace is, in fact, to select the best public blockchain platform. In this work, we evaluate the cost and the performance of three public blockchain platforms, Fantom, Avalanche, and Polygon, in a use case for minting and transferring NFTs. We present machine learning models to predict the transaction cost and the throughput for the three platforms as decision parameters to choose the most appropriate platform. Our experimental results in terms of transaction fees and throughput demonstrate that the Polygon network is more efficient than the other two platforms.
Artists are increasingly using blockchain as a tool for trading digital artwork as non-fungible tokens (NFTs); however, some are also beginning to experiment with the blockchain as a medium for generative art, using it as a seed for a generative process or to continuously modify an evolving piece. This paper surveys, reviews, and classifies the state-of-the-art in blockchain-interactive NFTs and presents a liberal-arts critique of the opportunities and threats posed by this technology, whilst addressing existing criticism on the broader topic of art-related NFTs. The paper examines some of the most experimental pieces minted on the Hic et Nunc (HEN) and Teia NFT marketplaces, for which a purpose-built research tool was developed. The survey reveals some reliance on centralised infrastructure, namely blockchain indexers, placing undesired trust on third parties which undermines the potential longevity of the artwork. The paper concludes with recommendations for artists and NFT platform designers for developing more resilient and economically sustainable architectures.
2021 was a miraculous year for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which led to confusion among observers of the phenomenon from both the art industry and regulatory authorities. This article provides a dispassionate analysis of the value of NFTs from an artist’s and intellectual property (IP) perspective. In the longer term, NFTs could improve the fate of artists to authenticate their works, set their conditions and get a resale compensation per transaction. This could happen, once their underlying works can be minted too, so that an NFT entails more than just a self-referential certificate. The article focuses on the US jurisdiction where the NFT phenomenon originated and only touches upon the EU jurisdiction in regard to the droit de suite right and Chinese jurisdiction in regard to the transmutation of NFTs into the speculation-proof ‘digital collectibles’. The introduction provides a primer on the blockchain, NFTs, and the paradox of digital uniqueness and authenticity. Section II addresses the value game of art before and after the emergence of NFTs. Section III investigates the commercial side of NFT art and its new version of Maecenas. Section IV provides an analysis of the rights of the NFT holder versus the rights of the artist from an IP perspective; and focuses on unauthorized use of underlying works and regulation in the US and China. Section V provides the conclusions and contemplates whether NFTs will redefine the future of art and artists: from a showcase of bragging rights to an essential tool for artists to protect their IP rights.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique non-interchangeable digital assets verified and stored using blockchain technology. Quite recently, there has been a surging interest and adoption of NFTs, with sales exceeding${\$}$10 billion in the third quarter of 2021. Given the public state of Blockchain, NFTs owners face a privacy problem. More precisely, an observer can trivially learn the whole NFT collections owned by an address. For some categories of NFTs like arts and game collectibles, owners can sell them for a profit. However, popular marketplaces trade NFTs using public auctions and direct offers. Hence, an observer can learn about the new owner and the NFT purchase price. To tackle those problems, we proposeAegis,(Aegis is a shield carried by Zeus and Athena. It is a symbol of protection.) a protocol that allows users to add privacy to their NFTs ownership. InAegisusers can swap NFTs for payment amounts in fungible tokens while hiding the details (i.e., involved parties, the NFTs, and the payment amounts). One of the main properties ofAegisis its complete compatibility with existing NFT standards. We designAegisby leveraging zkSNARK proof system and smart contracts. We build an open-source prototype and perform experiments to evaluateAegis's performance.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Art History and Market Analysis
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques