Art
Uniswap acquires NFT marketplace aggregator Genie to further ‘universal ownership’ goals
Decentralized exchange Uniswap announced the acquisition of the NFT marketplace aggregator Genie on June 21st. Uniswap said this move is part of its mission to unlock universal ownership and exchange on its platform. Uniswap is now integrating NFTs into its product line beginning with the Uniswap web app and later integrations are said to include developer APIs and widgets. This isn’t the first time Uniswap has worked with NFTs. In the spring of 2019 it launched Unisocks which offered NFT liquidity pools backed by real-world assets. Uniswap said in the announcement, “We’re excited to bring what we’ve learned building DeFi products to NFTs.” In August Uniswap said it planned to airdrop USDC to historical Genie users in an effort to share the value of this acquisition and integration. Uniswa...
Life-changing money: The 10 most expensive NFTs sold to date
Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are turning out to be a treasure store with prices striding into the millions of dollars. Instances of an NFT garnering more than $69 million or a tweet fetching $2.9 million are not a fantasy, but an incredible reality. In 2021, an NFT by digital artist Beeple, or Mike Winkelmann, sold for a whopping $69 million, making NFTs a media hotshot and opening the floodgates for a string of other NFT sales, many of these in millions of dollars. Prompted by the plentiful talk about NFTs, stars like Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Eminem, Grimes and many more have hopped onto the NFT bandwagon. In 2022, NFTs have been garnering attention from investors, artists and collectors alike. Let’s take a glance at the 10 most expensive NFTs sold to date: Beeple’s Crossroads — $6.6 ...
Chinese court rules marketplace guilty of minting NFTs from stolen artwork
A court in the Chinese city of Hangzhou ruled a one-of-a-kind judgment against a nonfungible token (NFT) marketplace for allowing a user to create (or mint) NFTs of stolen artwork. As reported by South China Morning Post, the court verdict toward the NFT marketplace was made after Shenzhen-based company Qice filed a lawsuit against NFTCN’s parent company, BigVerse. The lawsuit claimed that an NFTCN user stole a copyrighted artwork of Ma Qianli, a Chinese artist specializing in drawing and printing. The user of the NFT platform allegedly poached one of Ma’s creations of a cartoon picture. Based on the evidence collected, the court found the NFTCN platform guilty of not checking for forgery or intellectual property (IP) theft prior to allowing users to mint NFTs. As a result, NFTCN was charg...
While men wanted, women did: Empowering female creators with NFTs and crypto
With the blockchain industry growing at lightspeed, businesses are actively and, even desperately, seeking out talent; and there just doesn’t seem to be enough manpower out there. Enter women — literally around 50% of the global population that has, so far, been heavily underrepresented in crypto. With most developers being men, it’s understandable this still dev-led space noticeably lacks female contributors, but as the industry surges, womanpower is needed. And, so, women have begun slowly and steadily entering the crypto space and the world of nonfungible tokens (NFTs). While only an estimated5% of women own NFTs, and5-15% are creators or founders of collections, the impact of female-led NFT projects is profound. Unlike the mass of solely artistic projects, these female-led NFTs show a ...
Blue Chip and Metaverse NFTs propel growth of NFT Market, says Nansen report
On Tuesday, blockchain data analytics platform Nansen released its quarterly report on the state of nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. The report highlighted the rapid growth of the NFT market over that of the cryptocurrency market year-to-date, and it predicts of an $80 million market cap by 2025. As Cointelegraph previously reported, Nansen recently released six NFT indexes weighted by market capitalization denominated in Ether (ETH): Nansen NFT-500, Nansen Blue Chip-10, Nansen Social-100, Nansen Gaming-50, Nansen Art-20 and Nansen Metaverse-20. According to the Nansen 2022 Quarterly NFT Report, The NFT market continues outperforming the cryptocurrency market year-to-date, putting in a 103.7% return when denominated in ETH and 82.1% when denominated in USD. Despite a downturn i...
Museums in the metaverse: How Web3 technology can help historical sites
Metaverse events at ancient and historical sites could soon shape up to be an alternate future for tourism. Owners of physical castles and villas who have drafted up augmented reality blueprints of their properties think their ambitious plans to attract visitors in the metaverse will work, as virtual events can help them pay the hefty maintenance bills for their aging properties and also offer a chance to change historical narratives. The metaverse tourism model was expedited by downturns in tourism brought about by COVID-19, but the industry may have already been heading that way. Currently, major metaverse platforms are clunky, difficult to use and waiting for more “real estate” development, but firms are concentrating on what could be. Brands seem to be entering the metaverse en m...
NFTs are changing the way photographers create and market content
Since their explosion last year, nonfungible tokens (NFTs) have shown their appeal to collectors, investors and traders alike. They have especially gained attention in the art world, where an item’s provenance is everything, and owning the official, unique version of an item is much more valuable than a copy or duplicate. Some have postulated that artists creating and storing pieces on-chain can use the technology as proof of ownership for popular art forms. Among the various artforms to take advantage of NFTs, photography has also found its place, but what is the immediate value it brings for artists and consumers? Indeed, as a nascent, quickly developing technology, NFTs are not without limitations. Related: What is crypto art, and how does it work? Most participants began getting acquai...
Financial future or false promises? Crypto firms go big on ads in 2022
Advertisements are in abundance everywhere we go — from billboards seen throughout road trips to commercials displayed every fifteen minutes or so during television shows. It’s also the case that most advertisements today display messages from major internet-based brands like Amazon, which was ranked as the largest advertiser in the United States in 2020. Telecommunication providers and payment giants like American Express have also been listed as some of the biggest advertisers in the United States. These companies typically spend billions of dollars per year on marketing messages aimed to inform, persuade and remind consumers about their products and services. 2022 is the year for crypto advertising While dot-com brand commercials and social media advertisements continue to bombard...
Laundering via digital pictures? A new twist in the regulatory discussion around NFTs
On Feb. 6, the United States Department of the Treasury released a report under the headline “Study of the facilitation of money laundering and terror finance through the trade in works of art.” In fact, only a tiny fraction of the 40-page document is dedicated to the “Emerging Digital Art Market,” by which the department understands the market for nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Still, even a brief mention of the emerging NFT space in this context can have major implications for the tone of the nascent regulatory debate with regard to the asset class. What the report said The overall tone of the report is hardly alarming for the NFT space: The document casually mentions the growing interest in the digital art market both from private investors and legacy institutional players such as a...
Interscope Records Teams Up With LACMA for ‘Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined’ Exhibit: See the Photos
Interscope Records teamed up with LACMA to host a special preview of their collaborative exhibit, Artists Inspired by Music: Interscope Reimagined on Wednesday (Jan. 26). To celebrate the label’s 30th anniversary, the exhibit features over 50 pieces of art that reference both albums and songs from Interscope’s impressive roster of musicians including Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, BLACKPINK, Lana Del Rey, Snoop Dogg, Juice WRLD, Dr. Dre, Lady Gaga and more. Halsey, Shepard Fairey and Takashi Murakami are among the several artists that have contributed original works to the exhibition. Interscope executives Jimmy Iovine (co-founder), Steve Berman (vice chairman), John Janick (chairman) and Josh Abraham (music executive) all conceptualized the idea for the exhibit, later working with Staci S...
Reddit is testing out NFT profile pics but ‘no decisions have been made’
Reddit is testing out NFT profile pictures on its platform, with the news coming just a week or so after Twitter implemented a similar feature. The popular social media platform had around 430 million monthly users in 2021, and is reportedly working on an NFT profile picture implementation that will enable users to set their profile picture to any non-fungible token with an attached image. In an Interview with Techcrunch on January 27 , Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt stated that: “We’re always exploring ways to provide value for users and communities on Reddit. At the moment we’re testing the ability to use NFTs as profile pictures (avatars) and verify ownership.” “It’s a small, internal test and no decisions have been made about expanding or rolling out the capability,” he added. Ear...
Russian protest group Pussy Riot seeks to tackle gender inequality in the NFT space
Russian punk rock collective Pussy Riot is planning to launch a DAO for LBTQ+ and women artists. As the group’s co-founder Nadya Tolokonnikova told Cointelegraph, the DAO will be working on reducing the gender inequality that still marks the nonfungible token (NFT) space and, more broadly, the crypto industry. Despite the large gender gap in crypto — around 60% of US crypto investors are white men, according to a survey from August 2021 — Nadya is convinced that it is still early enough for Pussy Riot to make an impact. “The NFT space is still so small, I feel that with a good enough effort you can actually change it,” she said. Nadya is already using her follower base to promote the work of women and LGBTQ+ artists and connect them with potential collectors. The DAO will continue doi...
