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.
I opened up X this afternoon and I saw a photographer tweet that he hadn't sold a single NFT in the last four months. His conclusion: The NFT market is dying, if not already dead. There are no collectors left. Damn.
I'm sure it probably feels this way to most. But the reality is that there are a lot of asset classes that feel this exact same way today. (I know that many of you will contest whether NFTs are actually an asset class.) There aren't a lot of buyers out there right now.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the NFT market, in particular, is done with. In fact, if you look around, there are countless signs that point to the opposite.
I, for example, find it interesting that if you're an architect or a city planner in the US, and looking to check off some continuing education units, you can now register for a course at Harvard called From Crypto to the Metaverse: Blockchain Applications in Real Estate.
And if you look at the learning objectives, it includes things like demystifying how Blockchain technologies work, how they might impact real estate businesses in the future, and what opportunities they may create. This suggests we're still early.
Right now just feels like that time in the cycle that tests both your conviction and your discipline. It's easy to believe in something when everyone else does. But what about when most people don't?
Sadly, this can very easily happen in the world of crypto. If you connect your wallet to a bad actor and sign a malicious transaction, it is possible for someone to drain all of your assets (coins, NFTs, and so on). It's pretty terrifying. And I'm sure that a lot of people will see this and say to themselves, "that's why I don't like crypto! It's too risky. Too many scammers. Bunch of rat poison."
There is no question that crypto is risky. It's also not very user friendly. Clearly even sophisticated users can get tricked into signing the wrong kind of blockchain transaction. It happens all the time. But this is also a nascent space. And maybe this will become less common in the future as things mature.
Either way, there are things you can absolutely do today to protect yourself if you're planning to own and do crypto things. One of the most important rules to follow is this one here: you should have at least 3 crypto wallets. Let's call them cold, warm, and hot wallets (which is often how they are described in web3 land).
A hot wallet is the one you use to connect to sites, mint things, and do whatever else. Because of this, you want to keep almost nothing in it. If you want to mint an NFT, transfer in only whatever crypto is required to complete that transaction. That way if something bad happens, it's not devastating. Once your mint is complete, transfer out the NFT to a colder wallet.
A cold wallet is essentially your vault. This is where you store your Mona Lisas. These are the NFTs (or whatever else) that you plan to own for the long-term. The only transactions with this wallet should be to move things in and out of it. You should never connect it to any sites/services, even if they're reputable ones. Once you do that, it's no longer a cold wallet. It's now a warmer wallet.
A warm wallet lives somewhere in between. You connect it to sites/services that you trust, and you use it to hold NFTs that you might be looking to sell in the short-term (to give just one use-case example). In my case, brandondonnelly.eth is my warm wallet. It's where I mint the NFT photography that nobody ever buys.
I realize that all of this probably sounds convoluted, especially to those who are unfamiliar with this space. But in today's world, if you want to be crypto literate, you need to take things like this into consideration. My NFTs might be finally totally worthless, but I love my growing art collection and I like it being on ice in a vault.