Troy Warren for Mintified.Com #NFT
Since the sale of the record-breaking Beeple Artwork “Everydays – The first 5000 days” on March 11 2021, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have taken over in a media frenzy.
It seems that overnight, Beeple went from an independent digital artist selling $100 prints of his work in October 2020 to becoming a multi-million dollar artist. Artists, brands, content creators, celebrities, musicians have since all jumped on the bandwagon, with public interest growing into somewhat of a phenomenon over the potential of NFTs in the sphere of digital creation, particularly that of the creator economy.
What is the creator economy?
The creator economy is defined as the economic model for which independent creators (content creators, curators, community builders, etc) make a living, earning money through growing an audience. The entire creator economy is estimated to be $104 billion, having been significantly boosted by the pandemic.
The boost from NFTs
Lockdowns and job losses meant that millions of people turned to digital means as a way to maintain an income, and NFTs were an excellent way to facilitate that switch for many creatives. With the many gradients of opportunities emerging from the NFT market, independent creators and big corporations alike are capitalizing on the perks that NFT platforms provide them to expand their business and grow their brand.
What can NFTs do for the creator?
NFTs provide creators with security, cementing ownership rights with proof of ownership and a transparent transaction history embedded into their unique code. While an artist may upload a piece of their digital creation onto a platform like Instagram or Tumblr, there was no concrete way of proving ownership of the creation when it gets copied, pasted, and reshared, not until the advent of NFTs.
1. Creative freedom
Creative freedom is what drives art forward, it is the breathing space for great works of art to be born. With the lessened risk of piracy, copycats, or misuse of an artist’s work, it inevitably grants the creator space and freedom to explore more vectors of their creativity and expression, and allows them to have more security in showing their works to a wider audience.
2. Monetize your passion
NFTs provide convenience and accessibility with uploading and minting, with many marketplaces to choose from. Once you have an artwork created, getting your creation minted takes mere minutes. The Mintified marketplace offers gasless minting, allowing you to save more on the cost of pesky gas frees. With the ability to also write multiple royalties into the smart contracts of NFTs, artists can establish rates to earn a recurring passive income on top of the sales of their artworks.
3. Grow a community
The model of NFTs has allowed for the democratization of creator content, and it has given creators far more agency in what they choose to build off their passions, only limited by their creativity. When creators engage with other creators, be it when they take control of the conversations on platforms to engage their audiences, or when buying and selling artworks between creators – all this helps to destabilize and decentralize big corporations and big-name organizations that dominate the traditional art markets.
4. Connect with fans
With the accessibility of NFTs and the opportunity for fans to own digital art in a legitimate way, NFTs have the potential to unlock a whole new arena for creators to connect with fans and vice versa. Creators can continuously engage with their fans through airdrops even after the sale of the original NFT. With NFTs, fans will be able to have closer interactions with creators and their journey, supporting the works of the artists that they love as they grow, alongside other NFT owners in their community.
The future landscape of NFTs
There are applications that are currently being implemented (ticketing of events with NFTs etc), and others that have not yet been explored – all of which present a whole new class of utilization opportunities that bring NFTs closer and closer into the mainstream, at a scale we cannot possibly predict. It will create a whole new era for creators to monetize their passions and grow their brands, to turn their hobbies into careers and their careers into fortunes. For fans and collectors, it will grant access to layers of ownership that will build closer interactions between them and their favorite artists, musicians, fashion designers, gamers, etc.
