The last 6 weeks have been a mind-bending learning curve for me. I’ve jumped head first into the world of Cryptocurrency and NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens). WTF is a NFT? That’s a good question, and I’ll get to that.
After lunch with a friend who mines Bitcoin, and a chat with a client who’s invested in Ethereum, I decided that I needed to get my head around this confusing blockchain thing. My friendship group have been into it for at least 4 years but because the technology didn’t make sense to me, I just ignored it. Now I feel like it’s time.
Camel Fence - for sale on Foundation
<Tangent warning>
I believe in serendipity. Most of the positive things that happen in both my personal life and my professional life happen by chance; I’m not a planner. That’s also why I’m not a wedding photographer. I don’t like to book myself more than a week or two in advance, so the notion of having my calendar in 2 years full up does not appeal to me one bit. I thrive on spontaneity. I’m obviously meant to be a commercial photographer where everything is last minute and random. It’s exciting!
Just the other day I walked out of my house and bumped into a neighbour I’d never met before. She’s in marketing, communications, advertising, copywriting and public relations. Most of the work I do is with amazing people just like her. If I had not stopped by home to drop off shopping instead of going straight to work, had I not turned back to go inside because I forgot to put the washing on, and had I walked out 5 seconds earlier or later, we would not have had our 5 minute conversation where we identified that our businesses have so may synergies. There’s potential for life-changing work to be done here!
I recently created an account on OpenSea which is a platform to sell artwork as NFTs, and I posted about this on Facebook. This led to a friend sending me an exclusive invite to a platform called Foundation, so I joined and listed some work. What I found out later that day was that this platform is extremely hard to get invited to, and there are people that have been waiting for months to get an invite. I put out a post one day and a few hours later I get an invite. See, serendipity at work, again.
Anyway, I could go on about the serendipitous thing that have happened to me for days, but I want to talk about NFTs.
<End Tangent>
Chili Red - for sale on Foundation
What the hell is an NFT?!
It’s a Non-Fungible Token.
And what the hell is that?!
“A non-fungible token is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photos, videos, audio, and other types of digital files.”
Thanks Wikipedia for that explanation.
“Fungible” is like a dollar coin that can be exchanged for another dollar coin; it’s interchangeable but is still the same value. A Bitcoin can be exchanged for another Bitcoin and it’s the same. “Non-Fungible” means that it’s unique, there’s only one of them in existence. So when you put an artwork on a platform like Foundation, it gets assigned a unique identifier, or a token, and also has the information of the artwork it’s attached to. Now your work is officially a Non-Fungible Token! This is done by “Minting” your work. Read a few paragraphs down about the Minting process.
So basically, an NFT is a way for my photos to be authenticated as unique, given a value, on-sold, but furthermore, if a collector or investor sells my artwork in the future, I will be able to receive a percentage of the sale price in perpetuity. When I’m dead and my work becomes super valuable, my children and their children will be able to benefit from these sales. It’s almost like having an agent or gallery working for me around the clock. It’s also a way for selected works to be immortalised because this technology isn’t going anywhere.
At the time of writing this blog post, my 4 works on the Foundation platform are registered on the Ethereum blockchain, which means that they can be bought for Ethereum cryptocurrency. You’ll need to buy some Ethereum to buy my work.
I’m really excited about this NFT business because it’s not like investing in crypto or mining it. It’s just so much more relevant to me and it’s also inspiring me to go through my photography archives and collating my best creative work to put up for sale.
The first step to listing a still photo on Foundation is to upload file, give it a title and a description, then you have to Mint it, then you list it. What is minting?
“Minting an NFT is how your digital art becomes a part of the Ethereum blockchain–a public ledger that is unchangeable and tamper-proof. ... Your digital artwork is represented as an NFT so it can then be purchased and traded in the market and digitally tracked as it is resold or collected again in the future.”
Thanks to Foundation for that explanation.
There you have it. Clear as mud, right?
I’m still very new to this but this blog is about my understanding of it. I have a long way to go, and there are a lot of things surrounding cryptocurrency that I’m still learning about, such as the environmental impact etc but for now I’d love for you to check out, enjoy, share and buy my work.
Head over to my Foundation profile https://foundation.app/@benizm
For further reading, I would suggest the following: