What is an NFT?

Every day, someone asks me, what is an NFT?

Let me explain what it is, and how it ties into the art world - and why its not going nowhere.

The traditional art world expects that about 50% of blue-chip paintings are forgeries. These are things like Picasso's, Monet's, and Van Gogh’s. When you buy an expensive piece of art, it goes through an inspection process to ensure its validity. It goes to the lab, a scientist and an art historian will typically inspect the piece of art.

What they do, is they look under a microscope, and they look at how the paint has aged over time, they do a chemical analysis of the paint to see if the paint is new or old or what it was made of, then they do an inspection on the canvas, and wood that is framed in. The art historian will go through and look at the brush strokes, and a few other components and compare it to every other Picasso he's ever seen, for example.

At the end of that process, they'll go back to the buyer and say, this is real, or this is fake. Sometimes it's after the new owner has purchased it and they're out half a million dollars because they couldn't prove up front whether or not this painting was fake or real. This is avoidable through NFTs.

What an NFT is, is all of that information visibly available to everyone, very easily.

So for example, let's say I make my own piece of art, and mint it as an NFT. I list it on Opensea, and I say, this is my official painting. This singular file is the original. So, I've now added the actual file to the blockchain and the blockchain is basically a record of all history of a particular asset.

So you can see that I created this file on this date. I sold it to Joe, Joe sold it to Mary, Mary sold it to Snoop, Snoop sold it to Steve and now Steve has the final file. So if you want to buy that file from Steve for a million dollars, he can be like, I can prove this is the official file, because you can look at the transaction history of who created it when and who it went to and basically track its entire existence.

It is immutable and immutable means you cannot forge it. And that is what gives an NFT its value.

Rik Oostenbroek

That means that artists that have been doing digital art for the last 30 years, can now claim that the art they are selling is an original. That is something that was not possible before NFT’s. That means that the most current art, made by people growing up today, can finally have an attached value and becomes a tradeable asset. That means that investors get involved, which means that this market can now mature. Its a big deal.

Yes, the media hypes the simple images selling for millions - apes, punks, dickbutts, but you don’t hear about artists making real art that can now be recognized. NFT’s are just the technology behind what is happening, a digital art revolution.

This is a Crypto Dick Butt. It costs a lot of money.