Broadly speaking, the market no longer cares about NFT art. I love the collection that I have put together over the last five years and I continue to buy pieces from time to time. But it is becoming harder as fewer artists mint their work and as more marketplaces shut down. For instance, last month, Foundation announced that it would be closing up shop after a failed sale of the company. This was one of the most well-known marketplaces from the 2021 NFT era.
The other problem with marketplaces shutting down is that now many NFTs are at risk of getting lost forever. But how is that possible given that blockchains are supposed to decentralized and immune to this sort of thing? Here's my non-technical explanation, which you may want to pay attention to if you own any NFTs.
The actual images or graphics that make up NFT art can be stored on blockchains in generally one of two ways: either on-chain or off-chain (which is how most NFTs are stored). On-chain means that the code required to render the image (usually vector graphics) is stored directly on the blockchain itself.
One of the most notable examples is the CyberBrokers collection created by Chicago artist Josie Bellini. In this instance, everything is stored on the Ethereum blockchain. It's more expensive to do it this way, but it means that as long as Ethereum exists, CyberBrokers exist. So, pretty permanent!
The other way that NFT art can be stored is off-chain. What this means is that the NFT you are buying is essentially a pointer to an image stored somewhere else on the internet. Owning the pointer is a way of saying, "I own that thing over there!" And since the pointer exists on a blockchain, you should have it forever. The question is whether "over there" still exists or if it's pointing to nothing. This is the problem to be concerned about if you own any NFTs.
"Over there" can take many forms. The image could be stored on a centralized server like what Instagram would use when you upload a photo or story. In this case, there's a high degree of risk that your art could disappear forever and you'd be left with a pointer that points to nothing. The link would be broken.
Decentralized storage is better than centralized storage, but it's important to understand the differences. Some decentralized storage networks, like Arweave, are more or less permanent. Arweave works by collecting a fee upfront with the promise that it will be enough to cover the cost of storing the data for at least 200 years. So again, pretty permanent.
But the most common place for NFTs to be stored is on something called the InterPlanetary File System (or IPFS). IPFS is unique in that it is a peer-to-peer network that uses content-based addressing, instead of location-based addressing. What this means is that you don't ask the network "where is this file stored?"; you ask the network, "who has this file?"
This is a crucial difference because it means that as long as your NFT art is stored somewhere in the world, it will remain accessible. However, the challenge is that there isn't a permanent funding model, so if a marketplace like Foundation was paying to store your art on IPFS and has now shut down, then "stored over there" will disappear and the pointer will point to nothing.
The good news is that there's an easy solution if your pieces are on IPFS. All you have to do is store or back up your NFT art somewhere and then there will always be an "over there" to point to! The term used is "pinning" your NFTs and I've been in the market for a service for a while. I considered a bunch of companies, and then last week I signed up with Piñata. It's free for 1GB of storage or $20/month for 1TB of storage.
If you've collected any NFTs that you care about, I would strongly encourage you to make sure that you've pinned the ones you can. It doesn't matter what you use to do it. It doesn't have to be Piñata. This is not a sponsored post and I'm in no way affiliated with the company. I just care about the crypto and NFT space, and I would hate for any of you to lose any of the work that you've collected.
If you're a longtime reader of this blog, you might remember that back in 2021 we created the first-ever NFT collection tied to pre-construction condominiums (or at least we think we were the first to do it). It is called the Petra Cortright NFT Collection at One Delisle and you can read more about it here.
Cover photo by Peter Olexa on Unsplash
I recently got a Samsung Frame TV to use as an NFT display at home. I had been looking for one for a while and I finally pulled the trigger last week. The way the Frame works is that it's a TV when it's on, and it's an art display when it's off. But I really don't care about the TV part. I just wanted a good looking art display.
There are a lots of purpose-built NFT displays on the market right now, including Tokenframe, Blackdove, Muse, and others. And I was very close to getting a Muse Frame.
But ultimately I decided on the Samsung Frame because it was (1) cheaper for its size (50"), (2) it looks cool, and (3) I was fine with just a simple high-quality display. I think there will be lots more software and dongles created in the future for people who want to showcase their NFTs on whatever they happen to have at home.
However, if you're a crypto and NFT purist, this maybe isn't the display for you -- at least right now. Out of the box, it doesn't connect with any crypto wallets. And so you're not going to automatically see the provenance of each art piece (more on this below). Instead, the default method is to just upload JPEGs to the TV from Samsung's SmartThings app (insert right-click-save-as jokes here).
Overall, I'm really happy with the display. Here are my initial thoughts:
I have it set to randomly rotate through my art every 3 minutes. There's also a motion detection feature that works reasonably well. If it doesn't detect any motion, the display will go completely to sleep. But for some reason, it occasionally gets possessed and the TV will randomly turn on. Last week it kept turning on old Baywatch episodes. Possibly user error.
Samsung's SmartThings app is bad. It's buggy and a pain to use. For example, even though I've given it complete access to my phone's photos, they never seem to show up. I have to limit access and then go and select the ones I want to use in my gallery.
I have found that I prefer when the art is full bleed versus within the Frame's skeuomorphic picture mat. This is a new form of art and so I like the idea of breaking past traditions. But unless your images are 16x9 and a high enough resolution (I have generally found > 3000px wide to work), then you're going to get prompted to insert and select a mat design.
I have solved this problem by manually cropping and editing the individual pieces. Some NFT collections, such as CyberBrokers, also give you vector files which allows you to play around as you see fit. Again, if you're an NFT and/or art purist, you're probably not going to like this. But I think of it as curating the pieces.
Most of my art is on Ethereum, Solana, and Tezos. Being able to upload whatever I want is helpful, because not all NFT displays support all of the chains. The Muse Frame, for instance, only supports Ethereum and Polygon right now.
PNG files and video files aren't supported natively. This is a significant drawback and so eventually I know I'm going to have to change up the software that powers this display. And there are options. Bright Moments offers display software for holders of its NFTs. Fred Wilson's venture firm USV created this setup. And I'm sure there are countless others. These can solve the provenance issue mentioned above by pulling directly from the various blockchains.
In the end, I knew what I was getting into with the Frame. I knew it wasn't a purpose-built NFT display and I was fine with that. It's still early days in this space. But it sure is nice to finally see my NFT art in large format.
As someone who collects NFT art, I now see a lot of AI-generated images. Usually I can tell when an image was generated by a computer, but sometimes it's hard to tell and I'm sure eventually I won't be able to tell. But if I'm being honest, today I find that I have a bias toward art that was created without any AI prompts. Maybe that changes in the future, or maybe it doesn't.
Either way, the marginal cost of producing new content, such as images and videos, has now gone down to zero as a result of AI tools. (Here are some of my crappy creations.) That means that, if you aren't already, you're soon going to be faced with a deluge of things created in this way. This will almost certainly become the dominant form of content that we consume.
I don't think that we need to be scared by this future, but I do agree with Ben Thompson and others that it's going to make authenticity and human-content more valuable. In other words, we're probably going to need to know what is digitally scarce and what is just another thing generated by AI. Thankfully we have a suitable technology for this: it's called a blockchain.