In this year of COVID its been interesting to see the various ways people have tried to make money.
I’ve watched as certain stocks have risen, sometimes to seemingly ridiculous highs, and then there’s Cryptocurrency, which I still don’t understand…
One of the weirder things to rise is the NFT, or Non-Fungible Tokens market.
This one I really didn’t understand, though for a while there it seemed to be something plenty of companies were talking about.
If I understand this correctly (and please forgive me if I’m horribly off!), NFTs were a way for people to “buy” and therefore “own” a digital image or video.
The first time I heard about NFTs to any great degree it involved one time Wonder Woman artist Jose Delbo who made himself quite a mint on selling his images.
Here’s an interesting article about this particular artist and his sales. It was originally posted on kryptobia.com…
Who can sell a Wonder Woman NFT? The artist or DC Comics?
The upshot is that publisher DC Comics, who owns the character of Wonder Woman, grew concerned over Mr. Delbo’s NFT success -he reportedly earned something like 2 million dollars selling his Wonder Woman images!- and essentially brought the hammer down and forbid artists from selling their images via NFTs.
However, that was then and this is now.
According to the below article by Luke Plunkett and presented on kotaku.com, it would appear…
The NFT market has collapsed, Oh No
I can’t say I’m terribly surprised.
The fact of the matter is -and again, I may be totally misunderstanding NFTs- it seems to me NFTs were a hopeless cause.
I mean, buying a digital image may make you its “owner”, but what’s to stop these images or movies from appearing online anyway?
I mean, even if you own it, what does it matter? Can you profit off of it? I suppose you could if you found someone else who wanted to buy it, but that seemed like a limited thing.
Perhaps others are beginning to realize this as well and maybe that’s why the NFT market seems to be collapsing, at least according to the article above.
It’s a curse of the internet, truly. So much digital content is so readily available and one wonders how this will shake out in the future, whether with NFTs or not.
As it stands, we already have musical artists who have trouble getting money for their new music, especially given how easy it is to pirate individual songs via MP3s.
Its even easier to post full comic books online and, even though I’m far from the most well known author out there, I nonetheless have found my books available in questionable websites for “free” download.
Its infuriating, certainly.
The world keeps changing, I suppose and I hope that in the future there does appear some way for artists -including me- can keep their projects theirs.