Crypto art refers to the creation forms through blockchain technology, including the application of public chains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum in data, smart contracts, ideology and finance. NFT is an Ethereum non-fungible token specification, mainly implemented by ERC721 and ERC1155.
NFT application scenarios include decentralized domain name services such as ENS, as well as vouchers such as tickets, game cards, virtual land, etc. And NFT crypto art is just a subset of NFT.
In general, the overlap between crypto art and NFT is the current form that the mainstream community accepts. This form is closer to traditional art and easier for new collectors to understand, but it is far from enough for crypto art creation to be limited to NFT form.
For example, Small Goal (SG) by CryptoZR is a work reflecting the relationship between price and market value in the financial market (ENS address: Smallgoal. cryptozr.eth). The author modified the transfer function of the ERC20 contract and added a switch. When the restricted transfer is enabled, the SG Token will be completely destroyed by the holder during any transfer operation.
At the same time, the artist has limited the agency’s ability to transfer assets by contract. When the switch is turned on, the contrast transfer function will be disabled, thus locking the transaction price.
The artist then set up an SG/ETH deal pair through Uniswap and completed the first deal, setting the price to 1 ETH = 1000 SG, then airdropped it to the crypto community.
Because the market price is 1ETH = 1000SG, then the market value of 100 million SG is 100 000 ETH. When users open their wallets, they will see that their assets have increased by 100,000 ETH equivalent amount (over 100 million RMB), thus achieving a “small goal”. Interestingly, once the pair was created, an UniSwap robot immediately bought a large proportion of SG in the pool, pushing its price up to $3.89 per unit.
In this way, the author invites visitors to wonder whether price * quantity is the true value of an asset. In the course of multiple bubbles in the capital market, what are the real valuable assets and which assets are just air? When you want to cash in these air assets, do they still exist?
“Red and Blue” was a work published by CryptoZR in October 2019. Red and blue were used as background colors on both ends of the diagonal and the middle color blocks were generated in a linear smooth way, a total of 100 NFT. In addition, it launched a year-long auction on OpenSea.
The collector named GeoffreyX bought the diagonal blue and red blocks for 2.5588 ETH ($980) and 2.3162 ETH ($880) when the year-long auction ended Oct. 18, and 13 other collectors won bids for other colors blocks.
The artist did not tell the meaning behind the work when she was creating it. Technically, she used the separability and compos-ability of NFT to disassemble a complete pattern into 100 pieces of NFT that could exist independently. And collectors discover the value of the work during the auction process and assign meaning to the target color block to complete the work. Different from the general NFT, the bidding and bidding process of collectors affects the meaning expressed in this work, which is a new paradigm of joint creation of collectors and artists. Similar ideas have also popped up in PixelMaster and Reddit’s R /Place.
If we delve into the implementation details of NFT, we may wonder whether the metadata of NFT can be changed. Although NFT itself as a token cannot be changed, the content it carries can exist in the server, so can this feature be used for creation?
CryptoZR’s new work “CryptoAds” utilizes this feature. Artists hope that everyone can own their works for a period of time, rather than a permanent collector owning one of their works. It’s a new idea. The artist did a round of airdrops to the crypto community (in total, 2,050), which collectors can also get by sending 0eth to ads.cryptozr.eth (Gaslimit set to 200,000).
However, after the airdrop, an interesting thing happened. Both OpenSea and Rarible, the two main NFT platforms, blacklisted the contract of these works, and the users who received the works could not see the contents of the works in the auction platform and the wallet using OpenSea SDK. Which leads to the following questions:
1. In order to ensure that the work can not be modified, many NFTS adopt the IPFS scheme to store metadata. However, when buyers and users interact with the blockchain, they still need the platform’s web front end as a medium to achieve it. Then, does the platform’s front-end shielding conforms to the spirit of the crypto world?
2. Who decides what is legal and reasonable, and is there a mature governance process? Especially for the community project such as Rarible, if there is no normal process to take down NFT, and the front end developers can directly shield the NFT, then what is the role of its governance token?
3. Crypto artists will not stick to simple forms such as NFT+ image/video, and the application of the underlying functions of blockchain may exceed the understanding scope of the platform. Then, will the platform use its power to block these kinds of works?
4. NFT assets as a kind of crypto asset, the user has the authority to decide the processing means of it within their wallets. Does the platform have the right to remove NFT from the platform and the user’s wallet without the user’s consent?
5. For users, when the platform front end (and using the SDK wallet) blocked NFT, then, does it mean that the NFT you own is gone? What exactly is crypto asset?
6. For artists, have they considered their works will disappear because of the scrutiny of platform? What is the value and significance of blockchain for art?
Artist CryptoZR redefined her works in a clever way: Since the contents of the works were changeable, the front-end blocking, error 404, constituted a kind of censorship. Does it make a mockery of the “Decentralization” of the blockchain that arbitrary acts of anti-encryption community spirit have emerged on a platform that purported to serve crypto assets?
CryptoZR points the name, details, links, and images of NFT to the contents displayed on the OpenSea 404 page as “Not Found Tokens.” As the idea of the Web3 (decentralized Internet) becomes more popular and decentralized services grow, these previously blocked NFTs will one day be rediscovered in decentralized media. At that time, you will discover the NFT in your wallet and reflect on the essence of the crypto spirit.
Personally, the community NFT trading platform with cypher-punk spirit needs to meet the following conditions:
1. Governance token is effectively distributed and artists, developers, collectors can form a kind of balance. The distribution of token will be allocated according to the value contributed to the platform. For example, the distribution mechanism of Uniswap governance token is a fair and effective distribution scheme.
2. Add a fixed proportion of developer fund dividends in the auction, and DAO will vote to adjust the proportion of dividends. This way, the product can continue to contribute value to the developer foundation and motivate more developers to join the community.
3. The main website has a complete NFT online/offline voting governance process, and it is up to the DAO to vote on the presentation. In this respect, the platforms can also learn from Uniswap’s risk tips on strange token transactions. Instead of actively deciding to put tokens on or off, Uniswap gives the decision-making power to the community, which is more in line with the spirit of the crypto community through anti-censorship.
4. The front-end web pages need to be open-source, and each user can interact by running the blockchain light node and self-compiled or downloaded compiled front-end. Even if the NFT is not displayed on the platform’s website, users still have the right to display the content through a custom client and decide how they will handle each NFT asset they own.
Article from DecryptoArt
Translated by Yang(Mengyan Finance)