This research was sponsored by Plotaverse, an innovative NFT creator kit that provides a suite of iOS mobile, desktop and web applications to help artists create in the field of Motion Art.
The struggles of the starving artist aren’t new. Many of the great painters of the Renaissance lived in poverty in Italy five or six centuries ago.
Many great artists today — whether photographers, visual artists, painters or musicians aren’t the millionaires many believe they should be. No matter how talented they are, most are not able to even do their passion full-time on its revenue alone. While many artists see commercialism as a dirty word, one and all are quite aware of the fact that bills need to be paid and food doesn’t appear on the table by itself.
Some of these artists are forced to do their creative passion on the side or be supported through spousal income, pension or other income stream.
There could be said to be a number of reasons for this. Two of these reasons are:
- Exclusion of many central gatekeepers.
- Inaccessibility to liquid markets of buyers.
Breaking these down, one can see that many fields of art, as well as other fields such as banking and real estate are controlled by centralized gatekeepers. In the fine art field, galleries and big industry players are the gatekeepers. In music, it is the record labels. They can determine what art they want displayed on their platform, and they have implemented a “pay to play” economic system, where the artists are featured based on their ability to secure financial backing as opposed.
The second problem, the inability of the artist to immediately connect to a liquid market is partially influenced by the first problem. It could also be a problem because of the location, laws, politics and currency of the country the potential artist lives in.
If it was easy for any artist to get off the ground and solve this issue, there might possibly be millions more individuals that had this as their profession.
Blockchain and cryptocurrency offer unique solutions to these problems and have been already solving them for artists around the world. Let’s look into how:
Cryptocurrency
A cryptocurrency has several unique features that distinguish it from traditional currencies. Traditional currencies are issued by central banks of nations or political regions, such as the US Dollar, the European Euro or the Japanese Yen. They are centralized by definition. The country or Central Bank could even declare that a certain paper bill of that currency was no longer valid and being replaced by another, such as was done by the Prime Minister of India in 2016.
A cryptocurrency, such as Bitcoin, Cardano or Polygon, is decentralized. It is maintained by many different computers over the Internet. This makes it more secure since there is no single point of failure that a hacker can exploit.
In the case of Bitcoin or Cardano, its quantity has already been set forth in computer code when it was created, and it has no central authority that can print more, or ban those arbitrarily deemed by the central authority to be unwelcome for any reason.
Another aspect of cryptocurrency is that it is borderless. A cryptocurrency transaction can be done between parties in Cuba and Indonesia or Moscow and Johannesburg. If one is in a country with a very unstable currency, such as Lebanon or Iran, using a cryptocurrency that is traded across the globe has proven to be a more sustainable way of doing business.
Transactions on cryptocurrencies are nearly instant and trustless thanks to a feature known as a smart contract. A simple way to view a smart contract is a vending machine. One chooses what one wants to purchase, and as soon as the money is received, the item is dispensed. You don’t need to know the manufacturer of the vending machine personally to verify he or she isn’t going to steal your money.
Smart contracts work the same way in cryptocurrency transactions, except they are built into the computer code. You don’t need to trust the person you are transacting with, just as in the vending machine case. In the case of digital art, the ownership of the art is recorded on a special kind of token called an NFT or non-fungible token. The ownership of the token is transferred at the same time as the ownership of the cryptocurrency is transferred. This transaction occurs seamlessly and in seconds no matter where the parties are in the world.
Digital Art marketplaces that give NFT and cryptocurrency support open a portal to the 300 million+ global cryptocurrency users. Take a marketplace like OpenSea. It went from total obscurity to a marketplace with 360,000+ traders and $2 billion in sales per month. OpenSea has had its share of customer service and security issues. It is by no means perfect. But what it does is it has connected the liquid market of cryptocurrency users around the globe with digital art. Anyone with an internet connection and a smartphone or computer has access. It is fully inclusive, and requires almost no capital investment to start.
The past year has given a wealth of experience to see what works and what doesn’t for creatives. The team behind Plotaverse has learned from this experience and brings hundreds of years of experience in the creative industry into the digital art space.
Plotaverse
Plotaverse is an NFT creative kit and ecosystem with over 4 million downloads on its iOS applications. Plotavers was created by world-renowned visionary photographer Troy Plota and is an advance in the field of motion art. It aims to unite the technologies of digital art, NFTs and MP4 technology, adding a layer of security to digital art not available with JPEGs.
Plotaverse recently re-launched its iOS mobile app, and is in the process of adding support to convert your own art into NFTs and enable buying and selling with cryptocurrency in the coming weeks.
Contact
Connect with Plotaverse across social media and the web here:
Website | Instagram | Twitter | iOS Mobile App
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This content is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute trading advice. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. The author of this article may hold assets mentioned in the piece.