Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Tag: NFT art

  • How I’m displaying my NFT art

    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 16×9 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.

  • Scarcity in a world of AI

    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.

  • Cold, warm, hot

    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.

  • Nobody wants to collect NFTs anymore

    Back when everyone wanted to buy and trade crypto, my friend Evgeny started a marketplace for NFT photography called Sloika. This, to me, felt like an obviously good idea, both in general and for him specifically. Evgeny had previously cofounded the photo company 500px, and so Sloika was initially conceived of as 500px, but for web3. This is a good story.

    I have collected a number of photos via Sloika and, in general, I continue to regularly collect NFTs. Of course today, relatively few people want to trade and collect NFTs. The market is largely dead. What is obvious is that there was a giant NFT bubble and it popped in 2022, along with some other asset bubbles.

    But does this necessarily mean that NFTs and NFT art are bad ideas?

    When I think of bubbles I often think of something that Fred Wilson wrote on his blog. His argument was that bubbles tend to be directionally right; it’s the magnitude that we get wrong. A good example of this is the dot com bubble. Yes, it was a massive bubble. But it was directionally right. The internet was going to matter — a lot it turns out.

    Even if we go back to “tulip mania” during the Dutch Golden Age — which is often brought up as the pinnacle of dumb bubbles — one could argue that it was still directionally right. Today, tulips remain the most sold flower in the US. So we still love them; we just got a little too excited back in the 17the century.

    When it comes to NFT art, I like to think in terms of these questions:

    • Will humans continue to appreciate art? (Seems obvious.)
    • Will humans continue to want to collect things? (This is arguably a fundamental human instinct.)
    • Will provenance and authenticity continue to matter in art? (Blockchain technologies are really good at this.)

    Perhaps the only question that remains is whether people will want to collect digital art. But even this feels fairly obvious to me. The challenge, I think, is that the display side of the market needs to be more built out. Because alongside the instinct to collect things is the instinct to display them. That’s why NFTs initially took off as profile pics on social media.

    So as a start, I think more, better, and cheaper displays would be a big help. There’s something very different about projecting an NFT in your living room versus having it live in a crypto wallet on your phone or computer. You need to really experience it, just as you would a conventional piece of art. And like all art, context matters.

    I haven’t yet invested in a dedicated NFT display, but I plan to do that in the near future. And I’m looking forward to displaying my collection of NFTs, including the one at the top of this post. It’s a drone shot of the west side of Toronto in the middle of winter, and it was gifted to me by Evgeny. Thank you for that. It’s an honor to have it as part of my art collection.

    Photo: Six Bling (via SuperRare)

  • The Centre Pompidou in Paris now owns NFT art

    Last week, the Centre Pompidou — which is Europe’s largest modern art museum — announced that it has acquired its very first NFTs (18 pieces by 13 artists) and that it will be exhibiting the collection this spring. This makes them the first museum in France to own NFT art and, I’m guessing, one of the first in the world. (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently got some as well.)

    This is fun for a few reasons. The obviously fun reason is that it’s good for NFT collectors and people who generally support this space. Big institutions bring legitimacy. It’s one thing to say that these JPEGs are stupid while sitting at home on your computer, but it’s an entirely different thing to travel to Paris, visit the Centre Pompidou, look at its white gallery walls, and then say that these JPEGs are stupid!

    The other fun thing about this is that it shows a continued openness to new ideas and new technologies. Here are some words from the Pompidou (that have been translated, by Google, from French):

    The idea was not to be the first, but to bring together a relevant collection, which could testify to a creative and critical appropriation of a new technology by artists, and how this disrupts and displaces the art ecosystem. From its creation, the Center Pompidou has relied on the idea that contemporary technological creation and creativity should be at the heart of the institution. From 1974-1975, therefore even before the opening of the Center, the National Museum of Modern Art acquired major works and installations by Dan Graham and Bruce Naumann. Video installations using real time, and it was the very first institution to do so.

    This wasn’t always the case in France. One of my favorite art history classes from university was one that covered Impressionism. Partly because I thought their work was cool, but mostly because Impressionist painters were, in a way, early modernists. They rejected the academic approaches to painting and instead decided to make up their own rules.

    At the time, in the 19th century, this was seen as entirely radical. And it meant harsh criticism from the established art world and an inability to meaningfully exhibit at the Salon (which was everything at the time). But history has a way of showing us that if something is inherently a good idea, you can only remain stubborn for so long.

    The Impressionist painters began hosting their own exhibitions starting in 1874 and, by 1881, the government had withdrawn its official sponsorship of the annual Salon. The jurors wanted to cling to only traditional painting styles and the world wanted to move on. And here it is doing that again, today.

  • Call to Hamilton artists

    Our team is looking to partner with local Hamilton, Ontario-based artists and creatives as part of a new project that we’re working on for next year. So this post is intended to be a call to artists. If you’re based in Hamilton and doing great work, we would love to hear from you. Please drop me an email (brandon@slateam.com).

    In my mind, art and culture is a fundamental ingredient in Hamilton’s ongoing renaissance. Each and every time I’m in the city, I feel like I meet someone who is an artist. And there are so many great examples that we can point to.

    Take Scott Martin (aka Burnt Toast). Scott is a Hamilton-based illustrator and co-creator of the fantastically popular Doodles NFT collection. I don’t have one in my wallet, but I can tell you that I want one. The current starting price for a Doodle is nearly US$9k. But as an alternative, you could also just go to downtown Hamilton and look at one of Scott’s public murals.

    Go Hamilton. Please show us what else you are creating.

    Photo by Abigail Chen on Unsplash

  • Bright Moments should come to Toronto

    I love what Bright Moments is doing. And Fred Wilson’s post this morning — about their latest event in Mexico City — reminded me of that.

    Bright Moments describes themselves as “an NFT art collective on a mission to create environments where artists and collectors witness the birth of generative art together.”

    What this means is that they are working to move the experience of NFT art away from individual computer screens toward physical events where the art can be consumed and also created (i.e. minted) in a group setting.

    For a taste of what this actually means, check out their website and then hang out for a bit with their homepage video.

    So far they have hosted an event in the following 5 cities: Venice Beach (okay, actually a neighborhood), New York, Berlin, London, and Mexico City. And at each stop on their tour of what will be 10 places, they have done an in-person minting of their official collection, called CryptoCitizens.

    I haven’t been to one of them, but I can see how it would be a lot of fun and how it might change your perception of NFTs. So I am hoping that for one of their last 4 stops (the first stop was in the “Galaxy”), they’ll come to Toronto. Ethereum was pretty much created in this city, so I think it only makes sense for there to be Toronto CryptoCitizens.

    If you too would like to see this happen, make sure you tweet at Bright Moments and tell them that they should come to the greatest city in the world.

  • It sounded stupid when I said it

    https://twitter.com/DocumentingBTC/status/1553901007964442624?s=20&t=gRvygaF5RVVcIY-d_IHHeQ

    Click here if you can’t see the embedded tweet above.

    This is your daily reminder that many/most of the things that are ubiquitous today were once difficult to explain and understand (in the above example it’s email and the internet). Once a new idea or technology becomes widely adopted, its inner workings and technical aspects tend to recede into the background.

    Most people, for instance, probably aren’t familiar with all of the various internet protocols and how they work. Could you explain the difference between TCP and IP and SMTP? If you can’t, it doesn’t matter. The various protocol layers of the internet now work behind the scenes to power our daily lives. And the innovation that continues to be built on top of them is getting increasingly more user friendly as time goes on.

    The same thing will happen with crypto, which is talked about today in much the same way as the above folks are talking about email and the internet. New ideas will continue to emerge and we will all start deriving more and more utility from it (beyond just NFT art). And at that point, most people will stop caring about how all the sausages are made. They’ll just like eating them.

    P.S. One of the nice things about blogging every day is that I’ll be able to look back on this post in ten years and see how right or wrong I was.

  • Right-click, save as — world’s first Bored Ape restaurant opens in Long Beach

    The common criticism with NFT art is that it’s just a JPEG image. So why bother “owning” it when you can just right-click, save as? Who in their right mind would spend thousands, let alone hundreds of thousands on such a thing?

    But as I’ve argued before, this is missing the bigger picture and missing what this new technology has the potential to empower. Take for example, the new Bored & Hungry restaurant that opened up in Long Beach, California this past weekend (with lines down the block).

    It is being dubbed the world’s first Bored Ape Yacht Club restaurant, and here’s the backstory. Andy Nguyen is a successful food entrepreneur in southern California. And last month he spent US$267,000 on Bored Ape #6184 (yes, a JPEG).

    After doing this, he took to Twitter and asked: “Worst decision I’ve ever made or best idea of all time?” Of course, he clearly had a new business idea in mind.

    Fast forward to today and he now has a pop-up restaurant concept that is branded with his Bored Ape. And because the Bored Ape IP is very permissive, he is perfectly within his rights to do this. He can create whatever business he wants on the shoulders of his NFT, as can others with theirs.

    His restaurant is also accepting the new ApeCoin that is part of this NFT community, and if you yourself have a Bored Ape, you qualify for perks like free food. All you have to do is scan your crypto wallet. Digital asset ownership = real-life something.

    This to me is just one small example of the kind of new businesses that crypto and other digital assets might unlock. And I am sure that it’s the tip of the iceberg.

  • Toronto is missing out on one of the biggest economic development opportunities right now

    Wired published a great article last week talking about “the 10,000 faces that launched an NFT revolution.” What they are of course talking about are the CryptoPunk NFTs that I think most people would agree are one of the “OGs” of NFT art. Initially minted in 2017, they are usually credited with starting the NFT craze that we are all living through today. CryptoPunk #7523, for example, sold for $11.75 million. I think this is the most expensive CryptoPunk in the world. Either way, it is one of the most expensive NFTs out there.

    But as I was reading through the article I was reminded of something. Toronto is doing an awful job celebrating the fact that an immense out of crypto innovation has and continues to come out of Toronto. CryptoPunks, which is Larva Labs, was started by two guys from Toronto who met at the University of Toronto. I know that it is still early days for crypto and web3, but why are we not telling this story to the rest of the world and using it to continue to attract the smartest and most ambitious people to our great city?

    This is a missed economic development opportunity. And the door won’t be open forever. If any of our city leaders are reading this post (which is unlikely), I would encourage you to give this some serious thought and take action.

    On a related note, the above article is great evidence for Chris Dixon’s argument that, “what the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years.” Larva Labs was started by two software developers who worked during the day and used their evenings and weekends for new passion projects. CryptoPunks wasn’t their first initiative, but it has obviously come to define them. Smart people need room to play and experiment. Often that happens after hours.