Four months after reaching the 1 million dollar milestone, the total earnings for artists now exceeds 2 million dollars on crypto art platform SuperRare. According to their data collectors have earned another 675 thousand dollars from secondary sales. Almost nine thousand artworks have been sold on the online art gallery.
Crypto art is currently in the spotlight, as there’s lots of attention for non-fungible tokens in general. Many artists are making money on platforms like Superrare, Rarible, Async Art and Makersplace. These crypto art platforms are consistently in the top of the charts on Opensea and Nonfungible. They are good for a total trading volume of more than 1.2 million dollars in the past seven days.
This peak in interest also comes with negative side effects. Because users can mint their own NFTs on Rarible, the platform needs to do lots of policing at the moment. Scammers are trying to impersonate other creators or projects. At the same time users upload lots of crappy creations to the platform, making it difficult to find the gems.
Crypto art getting mainstream appeal
One of the most recent peaks of interest into digital art comes from the sale of an artwork called Right Place & Right Time by Matt Kane. This programmable artwork changes based on the trading action of bitcoin. It sold for more than 101 thousand dollars on art platform Async Art. The news was covered by Marketwatch, Yahoo Finance and more news websites.
The interest into crypto art doesn’t only come from cryptocurrency specialists. Mainstream brands and artists also see value in digital collectibles. Streets artist WhIsBe recently created digital artworks based on his Vandal Gummy creations, selling out in no time. In addition comic book legend José Delbo has been selling several creations on Makersplace as well.
What is crypto art?
Crypto art or digital art has been around for many years. However, without the existence of blockchain technology it was impossible to verify authenticity and rarity. Now digital art connects directly with an unique token on the Ethereum blockchain. That way buyers can see how many copies of a certain artwork there are, and whether the product is original.
The concept of seeing a digital image as art, is one thing. However, for many people it will be a challenge to consider digital images as valuable. Consider this: The Mona Lisa is worth many millions of dollars. If I would paint the Mona Lisa in an exact copy, it would be worth only 50 dollars. Because we all know where the original version is. Being able to verify the authenticity and rarity of a piece of art is crucial.
Some people don’t care about the Mona Lisa. It’s just a painting. They are happy to download an image for Google Images, print it on canvas and hang it in their living room. Others want the real deal. The same rules go up for digital crypto art. Some people want to original one, others are happy with a copy on their phone.
