Crypto Art is an artistic movement that is becoming increasingly important in recent years, born on January 13, 2018, when the first Rare Digital Art Festival took place in New York.
Crypto Art is like a digital work for which a Blockchain contains the corresponding token, an NFT (non-fungible token) which constitutes the title of ownership of the work, which allows you to trace all the steps and guarantee its authenticity. The Blockchain contains the digital imprint of the work, i.e. the metadata of the file produced by the artist which allows you to trace the work file, using the IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) protocol used for data storage.
The platforms that act as a digital marketplace in the Blockchain environment are called galleries. The first is the super rare gallery. It is very selective in admitting the artists who are examined after having sent a series of elements: a short video presentation, the portfolio, from 3 to 5 works with relative history/genesis, the reasons for choosing SuperRare, the presence on social networks.
Admitted artists can exhibit their works on the condition that they are unique works with three different selling methods: auction, fixed price and offer.
For the auction, the artist can choose between two different methods: auction with a reserve price, the minimum amount that the artist is willing to accept, or scheduled auction starting from a base price. The reserve price auction ends 24 hours after the minimum amount has been reached; in the case of a scheduled auction, a deadline is set for the end of the auction.
Both the artist and the buyer, to mint the NFT, must necessarily have an Ethereum wallet and payments must be made in the cryptocurrency ETH.
The artist will receive 85% of the direct sale price, and will then have a 10% royalty on the sales that will eventually occur in the secondary market.
The cryptoart.io site provides a list of over 6500 artists and for each of them, the number of creations and the economic values recorded in dollars with an ordered list, continuously updated almost in real-time, also regarding the market value of the works, with a difference between the monetary values recognized between the first and the last artist on the list of 5 orders of magnitude. The most commercially successful work is also indicated for each artist.
In just over three years that have passed, Crypto Art has established itself overwhelmingly.
It has given space and visibility to many young artists, leading to an emancipation of their figures.
With Crypto Art, the artist regains a role beyond the primary market, copyrights are registered on the Blockchain and managed with it in all possible subsequent exchanges of the work that are promptly traced.
The ability to reproduce the digital work without authorization can be blocked and through the Blockchain guarantee authenticity, uniqueness, non-reproducibility. Crypto Art, therefore, increases the importance and nobility of digital art.