Founded in 2020, APT. 55 is a project created with the main purpose of supporting alternative and emerging crypto and digital artists. Devoting our efforts to provide an emergent space for artists and art precursors in which they can make public their work and also participate and create temporary exhibits and fairs, worldwide.
With this project we want, little by little, to propose crypto art as an alternative to all kinds of artists and that's why we want to start by introducing a bit about the community and the ecosystem with this first article.
Let’s start by explaining what a NFT is. This abbreviation comes from non-fungible tokens and it can be defined as a unique and limited cryptographic representation of a token. To put it in other words, every NFT has an individual specification and stores unique information or attributes such as ownership and characteristics. This special feature also implies that a NFT can’t be exchanged or replaced.
They are set up on the Ethereum Blockchain as smart contracts using the ERC-721 and the ERC-1155 token. These standard tokens have different functions, languages and rules. Just to give you an idea of how they work, with a ERC-1155 token it is possible to set up a smart contract that can be used to mint unlimited fungible (identical) tokens and non-fungible (unique) tokens. In the other hand, the ERC-721 token standard only produces non-fungible tokens and every time you need or want a new one you have to deploy a new smart contract.
This revolutionary technology concedes fractional ownership of high-value goods and “unique” objects, whether virtual or a version of a real-world asset, stored and managed on the Blockchain. So we could agree that what makes appealing a NFT token is their uniqueness and digital characteristic.
You may be wondering how something inside of the blockchain has value, and to clarify that common doubt about this subject we must start explaining that all the objects that surround us have a value because people believe in their value so in that perspective each item is valuable and is no different from digital goods. Obviously, the value of a digital good is not inherent itself, instead of that is determined by those who consider it valuable.
This tokenization concept allows to administrate your goods on an extensive amount of possibilities, like exchange them easily, P2P transferring, fractional ownership, verify the list of the previous owners, the value history, and more; all these features grant a fraud detection on a 99.9%, avoid the interaction of intermediaries on the process and the cost of this service. To administrate your goods inside of the blockchain you need to use decentralized applications (DApps) and it will depend on which kind of assets you want to store or trade because basically, you can access to many types of markets, such as the art market, real estate, rare goods, and others.
Additionally, these tokens can be used as digital identity, this means that they can store identification and ownership data on the blockchain, increasing data privacy and integrity. Finally but not less important is that they can be easy and trustless delivered reducing friction in the global economy.
Although this is not a new concept, it was more popular inside the world of gaming and collectibles, better known as Digital Collectibles, which preserve the limited, unique and valuable idea of real-life collectibles. The best example of how NFT are used in blockchain games is CryptoKitties. Created in 2017, is the first blockchain game using this kind of technology for recreation and fun. Inspired by the Tamagochi pet idea, after you acquire one of these lovely cats, you can breed, collect, and trade them. Every cat represents a unique NFT with special and additional information or Cattributes, about their image, parents, breeding and ownership history, and serial numbers.
Even though the CryptoKitties don’t have a value as a currency, they can be exchanged and traded online as a crypto-collectible, these virtual cats move millions of dollars and they can have an incredible value up to 600 ETH (170.000$ at this moment). But this is only one example of many projects developed with this technology.
Continuing with the idea of Digital Collectibles and also because is one of the reasons for the renewed interest in NFT, we need to talk about the impact of some specific DApps like Rarible on the ecosystem. Rarible allows users, peer-to-peer, to sell, buy and promote original artwork as a NFT on their own marketplace and also create their token, $RARI. This token makes possible the idea of being rewarded by having digital collectibles with the largest share of tokens allocated to users when they sell their NFTs, not only with the collectible purpose but also offers the possibility to obtain yield farming and liquidity mining while using the platform. This idea became more attractive and got people’s attention during summer 2020, when the price of the $RARI token was up to 1700% and even DeFi traders started to create NFTs to be part of the community.
With the same principles, but also offering more NFT trading options to the customer, you can also use OpenSea. A crypto marketplace with an infinite amount of options of collectibles that allows you to discover and purchase them through different alternatives, depending on the seller's intention. Having this in mind, you can find items available for sale immediately or that will be soon and are open to receive offers; you can earn from referring NFTs to your friends and family with the Bounty option; get into the auctions and make the highest bid to get your collectible and also acquires items bundled together in a single purchase.
These Marketplaces, like some others, fostered the perfect environment to get involved with art. Following the blockchain philosophy it's possible to tokenize a representation of a physical piece of art and at the same time protect artist copyrights and prove authenticity with certificates hosted on the Ethereum Blockchain, at the same time it provides to future owners a documented and unalterable historical about the previous owners and transactions creating a trusted provenance, and provides a new platform to exhibit their work on a virtual space expanding their probabilities to sell.
Another way to tokenize art is through crypto art and here is where these two concepts, crypto collectibles goods and digital art, found a middle point to amalgamate and give shape to an aesthetic and community. To better understand we could picture it with their fundamentals:
Essentially Digital: Allowing artwork be created, editioned, bought and sold digitally.
Globally Omnipresent: Without any borders or barriers, crypto art is a global movement that allows artists from all over the world to be part of this community just by having access to an Internet connection and a computer.
Precursor of Freedom: For the first time inside the Art community everyone is encouraged to participate regardless of race, age, creed, gender, social class, skills, training, etc.
Decentralized: Giving autonomy and tools to artists designed to reduce the power of gatekeepers and intermediaries.
Confidentiality: Artists and collectors can conserve their identity completely anonymous by using pseudonyms without any social judgment.
Memetic: Crypto art establishes a new Memes value inside of the economy for their ability to spread quickly.
Pro-Artist: Granting to artists to be remunerated accordingly to their sales because Blockchain platforms often take little to no commission from artists.
Organic: Because crypto art right now is a living organ capable of changing and mutating all the standard and traditional ideas, all the social conventions and all the judgment around art, making it possible to explore easily with expression and creativity.
Accessible: Never was easier than now to buy art, you can join this community and start your personal piece of art just with a few ETH, so you can have your favorite Ethereum block on canvas in your living room or just have it digitally in your wallet and maybe one day your collectible could end up on the Christie’s auction house and being sold for over $130K.
Malleability: Transforming and appropriating any image into NFT giving another meaning to Walter Benjamin's words when he talked about image reproduction. This means that in every reproduction, as a result, we have something original, beautiful and unique, because of this organic characteristic, it’s changing our perception about the artistic authenticity, about the aesthetic authorities and attributing a new value to art.
We can conclude that even though NFT it's mostly used in video games and entertainment, every day more and more companies and economic sectors are including this technology to their structures, incorporating it in our everyday life routines. The potential use of NFT can cover a wider market, developing more functional and efficient applications reducing also the cost of their implementation.
Related to art value and more specifically crypto art, at this point we can agree that it is built around popularity and tendencies, led by the Ethereum Blockchain ecosystem and since this summer we all can agree that we are facing a completely new phenomenon, a new crypto art era and is impossible to continue obviating that we are the primary actors.
So assuming that responsibility and also because there is not enough documentation about this, we consider it is important to comment more about it, contributing with the community and in accordance with the objectives of our collective, this can be a space to talk about crypto art and NFT in general, provide visibility to crypto artists and art precursors, federate a community around crypto art, create crypto art fairs, workshops and more...
Our plan is to publish an artist interview weekly, this way we will help new artists to promote their work and when the actual world conditions let us make it real, we would like to invite them to be part of our future home location in Lisbon.
If you want to join us, be part of the collective and help us to write more about NFT in general, you can contact us on Twitter and Discord.
Be part of our family!
Twitter for our latest news.
Rarible for our art and collaborations.
Discord for chatting with our members and community.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. Never miss an update.
Stay up-to-date
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new article goes directly to your inbox.
Join the crew
Be part of a community of people who share your interests.