NFT.MUSIC.ART. Алексей Комов
to Komova Victoria Georgievna for assistance in proofreading;
to Zabirov Ramil Shavkatovich – translation agency Aatoslingvo
Chapter 1:
What is NFT and how to use it?
What is this?
How are NFT and crypto related?
How did NFT tokens appear?
How does NFT work?
Where is NFT used?
NFT uniqueness
NFT legal base
What is this?
NFT has already taken over the whole world, but not everyone still understands what it is and how it works. Many of us would like to understand the world of cryptocurrency, develop own projects in this area, or, receive profits from investments in NFT. Cryptoworld is in a stage of active developing and in search of new talents. If you want to be one of them, now this is the best time for it.
NFTs are hard to understand, and there are two reasons for it:
– they do not exist in a real world
– this topic contains many technical terms
Our guide is written in a most understandable and clear language, without large use of technical words. In a few chapters you will get the general idea how to adapt to the NFT world, create your own project and make your first profit.
NFTs or non fungible tokens are digital assets that establish ownership of an object: pieces of art, music, in-game assets, videos, tickets for events, digital property, avatars or any other object. Now let's get in details.
One famous digital artist Beeple created a set of 5000 everyday drawings called "First 5000 days". Anyone can look at this collage online for free. This composition was sold at Christie's for $69 million. Why spend millions on something that you can just download or take a screenshoot?
NFT allows the buyer to own an object. The unique ID has a built-in authentication, that serves as proof of ownership. That is, NFT buyers acquire basically a code, which already manifests itself in a certain image, music, video etc.
Why people want to spend millions on what they can screenshot or download? NFT allows the buyer to own an object.
Turning your labour into a digital asset looks like a promising way of earnings. There are lots of reasons why you should do this, and we will thoroughly study every single reason.
How are NFT and crypto related?
NFTs are sold and bought in internet for cryptocurrency. Also, you have to know that NFTs are encoded with the same basic software as many cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin or Ethereum.
But physical money and cryptocurrencies are interchangeable, that is they can be exchanged for each other.
NFTs are unique in that they differ from each other. Everyone has a digital signature, which makes this exchange or equivalence impossible. That's why we call them non-fungible.
How did NFT tokens appear?
In 2012, Meni Rosenfield posted an article in which he presented the concept of Colored Coins. These coins describe Bitcoin's method of representing and managing blockchain assets and coins can play a role of a signature to confirm ownership of assets. Basically, these are ordinary bitcoins, but with different way of usage.
This idea of colored coins was not implemented, but, created a base for NFT in a future.
In May 2014, a digital artist Kevin McCoy created the first NFT – Quantum. It was a pixelated pulsating octagon that changed its colors, forms and shapes within itself. It looked hypnotically alive.
According to Kevin, NFT became a natural development of a long-lasting cooperation between artists and technology. His work "Every frame, every episode" can be seen in Metropolitan Museum of Art even today.
Seven years after NFT Quantum was created, the one-of-a-kind piece was sold for nearly $1.5 million at Sotheby auction.
At the same time, blockchain Ethereum introduced a set of standarts according to which developers could create tokens. The standart has become a supplement to smart-contracts. We will talk about the importance of contracts later.
CryptoArt was initiated by a cultural phenomena like CryptoPunks, Rare Pepe and CryptoKitties. They got their popularity due to viral network effects and laid the groundwork for NFT era.
In 2014 Robert Dermody, Adam Krellenstein and Evan Wagner created a Counterparty, a peer-to-peer financial platform and open source distributed internet protocol built on Bitcoin blockchain. Counterparty made it possible to create assets and had decentralised exchange, that allowed other people to create their own traded currencies. This allowed to share ideas and possibilities, including the memes trade without any problems with fakes.
In 2015 Counterparty became a partner of Spells of Genesis.
In 2016 with an NFT Rare Pepes premier on the Counterparty platform, a new era of memes began and got an enormous success. Pepe the frog, or, Rare Pepes, is a comic character and become an internet sensation.
After Rare Pepes success, John Watkinson and Matt Hall created a project called Cryptopunks and attention to NFTs just increased. Cryptopunks will never have two identical characters, and their number will be limited to 10,000.
In 2017 everyone started to talk about CryptoKitties. This is a game based on a blockchain, where people can adopt, breed and even trade with cats without leaving their digital wallets. Game become so popular that people started to get more and more earnings. CryptoKitties was on a news headlines, including famous CNBC and Fox News. Many people started to understand a true potential of NFT.
In 2018–2020 NFT was dominated by games. This is how the first decentralised virtual reality platform based on Ethereum was created, and it was named Decentraland. Thanks to this game, players started to own in-game assets and earn money.
On St. Valentine's day in 2018, artist Kevin Abosh joined GIFTO for a charity auction. The partnership led to a $1 million transaction for a CryptoArt piece called The Forever Rose.
From 2021, a new era of NFT has begun. The surge in purchases became striking, the amounts increased to astronomical. When Facebook has announced that it was moving to the Metaverse and renamed itself Meta, it became obvious that the exploding NFT time was just beginning.
Rapidly rising popularity of NFT just started to show its unlimited possibilities. If you want to catch one of this possibilities, you have to know how to do it.
How does NFT work?
NFTs are created from digital objects representing tangible and intangible objects. Most of them are digital collectibles.
The acquisition of NFT guarantees your exclusive ownership rights. NFT can have only one owner, and usage of blockchain technology makes it easier to verify ownership and transfer tokens between owners.
The creator of the NFT product can also keep certain information in metadata. For example, artists can sign their work, including a signature in a file.
NFTs exist in a blockchain, which looks like a distributed public ledger in which transactions are recorded.
Contracts of owning NFT contain special data that usually consists of:
– NFT name
– typical description
– image URL pointing to the data
– other random data
These data are called metadata. Smart-contract programming is coded in Solidity language.
Since everything is decentralised, there is no common point where all of it is stored. Smart-contracts cannot be removed and cannot be regulated by anyone or anything.