What is digital art? What is the place of Art in the NFT ecosystem?
The definition of the Non Fungible Token standard (ERC-721) on Ethereum obviously benefited the crypto-collectibles industry first. CryptoKitties is a good example of crypto-collectible pioneers, these cute kitties helped spread the word about this new standard towards game developers and the mainstream.
Although CryptoKitties was among the first famous projects to use the ERC-721 standard, it is important to point out that this standard was inspired by a digital art project: CryptoPunks
The Larvalabs team created 10,000 unique ERC-20 tokens, each of them looking different from the other. These digital punks could be claimed for free, you only needed to request one and have an Ethereum wallet to receive and store it. No need to mention that all of them were sent quite quickly!
The CryptoPunk-experience was a large success, and is still today one of the major milestones of the non-fungible token ecosystem on Ethereum, and kicked off two major use cases: collectibles and digital art.Collectibles are pretty popular thanks to projects like Cryptokitties, Blockchain Cuties, MLB Champions and trading card games: Gods Unchained, Mythereum, Dark Winds…
But what about art? Has the blockchain art ecosystem had the same growth?
Before looking at the statistics of this universe, it is important to define the evaluation criteria of this market. Indeed, for video games it is the use of NFT in the game that will determine its value. But with art, valuation appears to be a little more tricky.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of criteria that can determine the value of a digital piece of art:
Estimating the value of Art has always been a tough exercice, and it is still the case with digital Art and NFTs. This (non-exhaustive) list provides some hints about the complex mechanisms that define the value of an artwork.
What is the position of Art market in the global NFT space?
Focusing specifically on digital art trends, we have based our analysis on 9 projects issuing art or directly related to the art ecosystem. Our goal here is to measure the importance and impact of the Art industry in the NFT ecosystem.
We identified that about 44,075 unique active addresses interacted with non-fungible tokens since January 2019.
Only 4,770 of them traded artworks, so about 5%
On a little more than 750,000 transactions, there are 41,031 related to the art market.
The volume of digital art market stakeholders and transactions is still pretty tiny compared to the global NFT market.
We based our analysis on the data of these 9 projects:
Not all projects work the same way. While some are backed to physical artwork that need to be sent, others will only represent digital assets.
It is also possible to sell the work only once or obtain a reproduction (which will also have a unique identification).
To understand the differences between these projects, here is a quick explanation of each one of them:
“In the arts nothing lives but what continually gives pleasure” – Stendhal