No, that subtitle was not a typo, but you can stay; we accept grammar-nazis here at The Nifty Report!
You’ll be forgiven if you haven’t already heard of the crypto artist whose work has got the NFT world talking: Alotta Money (@money_alotta on Twitter). This week, he collaborated with fellow artist Jivinci to create “Saint Nakamoto,” which subsequently set the record for the most expensive piece of art sold by Superrare, a platform that allows digital artists to list and sell their artwork as NFTs.
“Saint Nakamoto” sold for 11.12 ETH, which was about $1600 USD at the time of sale (oh boy this reminds me of an old blog post where I wrote about Bitcoin’s market cap being $33 million and why I thought that was way too low). We’re getting excited about $1600, which is a great accomplishment at this early stage, no doubt, but where is this space headed?! Too exciting. TOO exciting.
The piece in question (you’ll have to head over to superrare to get the full effect as it’s an animated gif):
@justmatthew was the buyer, who is the 6th-most spendy collector on superrare, having dropped 25.2 ETH on 35 pieces of art. Here’s a quick snapshot of the current rankings on superrare (apologies, as they don’t let you sort the table by any metric other than “# of collected pieces”):
This week’s activity puts superrare into 4th place for sales volume according to nonfungible.com, just ahead of Cryptokitties and Axie Infinity.
It’s definitely interesting that we’re seeing art sales exceed the volume of NFTs that are associated with gameplay, as there have been many heated discussions on the Cryptkitties discord server about whether gameplay was needed to create value for collectors. Apparently, the answer is a firm “no,” if the visual appeal of the NFT is sufficiently enticing! Or maybe it’s “yes?”:
@Lazarus2571 hilarously responded to the buyer’s blog post about his justification for spending 11 ETH on “Saint Nakamoto,” claiming that the piece was basically worthless, and then signed it with “Create don’t debate!” Grab your 🍿 and head over for a read.
In the next issue of The Nifty Report, we’ll dive further into NFT art, Cryptovoxels, and why you should be paying attention (i.e, the case for FOMO). It’s an exciting confluence of two NFT economies that may define the next evolution in how we interact online.
Subsequently, we’ll introduce the concept of NFT “Classes” which is an attempt by some up-and-coming projects to define the quality of an NFT based on whether its meta-data is stored on-chain and is truly decentralized and immutable. The need for these definitions was highlighted after a recent incident on OpenSea where fake copies of NFTs were created by nefarious trouble-makers (tsk, tsk)!