Editor's Note: This article comes fromDappReview（ID：dappreview）, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
Editor's Note: This article comes from
, reprinted by Odaily with authorization.
The author of this article, Mable Jiang, is the executive director of Multicoin Capital.
I have been wanting to write on this topic for a long time, so I just use this article to record some thoughts and inspire others. Special thanks to Vincent, the founder of DappReview, who talked with me for 90 minutes and inspired me to write this article.
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The Next Development and Opportunities of NFT
It has been nearly three years since CryptoKitties became popular in 2017. During this period, various games containing NFT pre-sales of game props have emerged in an endless stream. The earliest OpenSea, an asset trading platform, is enough for everyone. The collection of encrypted art has also sprouted since the beginning of last year (the first batch of art platforms, such as Edition, SuperRare, Digitally Rare, RARE Art, Mintable, etc.), and by this time last year, there were already ten to twelve, And now some of them have been permanently closed, and SuperRare has suddenly become known to many people since this spring (probably due to the epidemic situation, everyone is very keen on virtual viewing)."The art on the NFT chain has developed to this day, and has accumulated enough works, but lacks a tool and platform for sorting out.https://github.com/artsy/the-art-genome-projectIn the traditional art world, it is worth learning from artsy.net. Artsy was established in 2009, and Wendi Deng is the co-founder. Compared with other online art trading platforms, it is impressive that it has subdivided tags for all the artworks they contain online, called "The Art Genome Project
), including every genre, period, material, technique, theme, etc. In essence, this is similar to the information flow on Twitter and Weibo, or the concepts and sectors in the stock market. With different segmentation tags, collectors can find all related works by searching related tags. This can be of great help in choosing investment targets by analyzing popular trends.
The Art Genome ProjectScreenshot of artsy.net home page
screenshot of page
Another question worthy of everyone's deep thinking: Is the current bottleneck of encrypted art caused by not having enough people from the real art circle to participate? Vincent’s point of view is that, just as the cryptocurrency circle has always believed that traditional funds are needed to enter the market, the current growth bottleneck of the encrypted art circle is largely due to the fact that there are not so many professional artists entering the creation, so the artistic quality of the works themselves is not rich enough to be able to Attract more collectors.
image descriptionBCA, known for its resources in the art world, may be a route to the outside worldOn the one hand, I very much agree with leading creators in the art circle to try NFT as their digital art communication medium. From this point of view, the interaction between the two circles can indeed bring a group of players who collect traditional art. But on the other hand, I don't quite agree with the fact that the artistry created by existing creators is not strong enough, resulting in few audiences, because artistry has clearly tended to be undefined by professional art techniques since the second half of the 19th century . For example, Manet's works in the late 19th century, the audience's
It is part of the meaning of the work; another example is Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" in the 20th century, in which the classic sentence "the death of the reader must be at cost of the death of the author), pointing out that the creator is only the trigger of the work, and it only produces meaning at the moment when the viewer receives it.
Therefore, from my point of view, NFT just further normalizes and flattens modern art, so that everyone can make their own creations into NFTs and carry them in their wallets, and other people can also inquire and watch other people's works at will. Just how to become the hottest creator on the platform is similar to competing for traffic with thousands of other creators on Douyin (excluding advertising). See who can lead the topic, each depends on his own ability.
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The financialization of art assets did not start because of the rise of encrypted art.
Emigrant BankIn fact, as early as ten years ago, private banking departments such as UBS and Citigroup had already begun to explore this aspect. In New York, there are also banks like Emigrant Bank that specialize in art financing and credit. The art finance department of these private banks will be based on professional art connoisseurs (usually researchers who have done decades of research in museums or auction houses) on the quality of works (how well preserved), preciousness and integrity (such as Whether a series is complete or not) makes a corresponding price determination, thereby unlocking a certain amount of liquidity by using artwork as collateral. Usually the LTV (loan-to-value) of this kind of credit is 50%, that is, if you mortgage a painting worth 1 million, you can borrow 500,000 in principle on the premise that there is no other haircut in the evaluation money. The bank will also re-evaluate at regular intervals to determine whether the valuation has been lowered, whether to require additional collateral, etc. The liquidity created by mortgaging artworks that cannot be split allows collectors to gain flexibility in turnover (you can buy more paintings).
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Artwork financing services provided to customers
In the early days, the evaluation of works of art finance and the people who actually granted credit (underwrite) were two different groups of people, because appreciation evaluation had high professional requirements for personnel, and experts with rich experience in hands and eyes were needed for appraisal. But then gradually a small wave of private buyers began to mortgage digital art for financing. For the evaluation of the value of digital art, since there is no judgment on the superiority of techniques in digital art (or "brush and ink" in Chinese calligraphy and painting), it is largely based on the analysis of data: the recent popularity of the creator , the performance of works in international auctions and private sales in galleries, the frequency of exhibitions, etc.
https://www.theblockbeats.com/news/3064
Until 2012, I still wondered why anyone would be willing to pay on Artsy without looking at the work itself: even if it is modern art that does not necessarily pay attention to techniques, I am confused. Ultra HD scan, I think the naked eye sees something different)? So for a long time, I felt that Wendi Deng was using investors and her own love to generate electricity, and felt that buying non-digital art online was a false demand. But today, with more digital art and on-chain art, I think the era of e-commerce that belongs to art has really come.
When writing this, I remembered what I wrote three years ago in an article I wrote last year:
When I was an art history student a few years ago, I couldn't figure out why someone would pay a lot of money to collect Digital Arts. I thought it would lose the uniqueness and non-reproducibility? From the perspective of pure art transactions, their circulation and appreciation space are also very limited. The explanation I'm trying to give is that the circles that endorse Digital Arts see these works as giving them aesthetic value (or any other subjective value, including pleasure), and care less about whether the work is reproducible (rarity) or not Bring sufficient economic premium. Also today, the barrier/fault between the virtual world and real life in the game lies in the pleasure obtained by those who are willing to spend time playing the game, which is meaningless to those who do not play the game (unless they speculate on props for economic benefits). These two examples both reflect a mismatch, where the value of a certain virtual asset is not equally recognized by insiders and outsiders participating in certain activities.
The unequal value recognition between physical assets and virtual assets may be connected by economic value today. For example, a person who cannot identify with digital art, he chose not to participate in any digital art-related activities before, because his psychological valuation cannot match the price tag (too expensive, not easy to sell, etc.). In the future, digital art is based on blockchain circulation, can be divided, and has better market liquidity. For those who cannot understand the works, they may still be willing to participate in purely economic activities. The inspiration from Ready Player One is that in the future world, every individual will be the creation and participant of multiple communities. Because the threshold is low enough, some circles that might have been irrelevant can also be explored for the first time. value exchange.
In traditional art collections, there is a kind of collector who likes to put things away at ordinary times, and occasionally takes them out to play with, and then hides the scroll after finishing playing, so as to obtain a pure psychological pleasure; another kind of collector likes to put Put the things you collect in the center of the living room for people who come to see. As the owner of the work, you can have a sense of uniqueness and pride psychologically. But on-chain art, you can call up all the NFTs it owns by simply querying an address, and you can watch it as many times as you like every day, and all of them are free. Therefore, for on-chain art, whether you own this work or not has almost nothing to do with whether you can have the same viewing experience.
So I suddenly realized that what really supports the value of encrypted art may not be the rarity or non-reproducibility that everyone praised as a meme two years ago. Encrypted art, in addition to the certain artistry of the work itself (for the time being, no matter how to define artistry, because this is a question that runs through the entire art history "What is art?") and the creator's reputation, the more important point is that it is more important than traditional art. Stronger liquidity (it is easier to change hands, collectors do not need to deal with cumbersome details such as mailing and transportation, and there is no buyer's regret and void after the auction, etc.), it is easier to compare with other non-similar assets Carry out value exchange (I collect a piece of encrypted art, which can be exchanged for a piece of land on cryptovoxel). Even like First Supper, if I collect a whole set (main layer + sublayer), I can choose to only realize one layer when realizing it, but it is difficult to pick out a piece of ordinary oil painting and take it out Sold (except for Huang Gongwang's "Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (Remaining Mountains)" haha). Of course, it must be pointed out that whether it is in the traditional art world or encrypted artists, the price of a complete set of works must have a certain premium over the sum of the selling prices of individual pieces (this is also the case in art mortgage financing. ).
Assets of games on the chain can also be interpreted with the same logic. Why are Gods Unchained cards so expensive? It is true that they formed a market effect at the time, and asset prices were more or less pushed up, but another very important point is that its market is compared to the market for offline collectible Magic (limited to the same region, or if Cross-regional transactions also need to be mailed) are more liquid, and the cards on the chain can be seamlessly exchanged for other assets on the chain that have nothing to do with the card. Although technically speaking offline, the money you sell Magic: The Gathering can also be used to buy other things, but this is incomparable to the liquidity of directly buying other unrelated assets on the same trading platform, not to mention If it is just an ordinary online card game asset, it cannot be realized out of the game.
