Digital art is a form of creative expression that uses digital technologies to produce or display artworks. Digital art can include images, animations, videos, audio, games, and interactive installations. One of the recent trends in digital art is the use of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are unique and verifiable digital certificates of ownership that can be attached to any digital file. NFTs allow artists to sell their digital artworks directly to collectors, without intermediaries or physical copies, and to benefit from secondary sales and royalties.
One of the challenges of digital art is to establish its value and authenticity in a world where digital files can be easily copied and distributed. NFTs address this issue by using blockchain technology, which is a decentralized and secure system of storing and verifying data, to create a permanent and immutable record of the creation and ownership of each digital artwork. NFTs also enable new forms of artistic expression, such as generative art, which is art that is created by algorithms or rules, and programmable art, which is art that can change over time or according to external inputs.
The popularity and demand for NFT-based digital art have soared in the past year, reaching unprecedented levels of sales and media attention. Some of the notable examples of NFT-based digital art include:
- Beeple's "Everydays: The First 5000 Days", a collage of 5000 daily images that the artist created over 13 years, which sold for $69 million at Christie's auction in March 2021¹.
- CryptoPunks, a collection of 10,000 pixelated characters that were generated by an algorithm in 2017, which have become one of the most sought-after and expensive NFTs, with some individual CryptoPunks selling for millions of dollars².
- Constitution DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that raised over $40 million in ETH from 17,000 donors in a few days, with the goal of buying a copy of the U.S. Constitution at a Sotheby's auction in November 2021.
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