Fashion for crypto art

Blockchain consultant Denis Smirnov-about what NFT is

Sergey Medvedev: The future occurred in 2021 for NFT technologies . What is it? Everyone is talking about it. Two large hype of this year is Clubhouse and NFT ages that sell digital art for hundreds of thousands, millions and tens of millions of dollars. How can I use blockchain when selling art items? Is the revolution coming in art, property rights and copyright?

Correspondent: Recently, the demand for virtual works of art has been growing on the Internet. The precedent was the purchase of a platform for blockchain transaction injective Protocol paintings “Morons White” by the famous artist Banksy for about 95 thousand dollars. After that, the company publicly burned the work, before this, converting the work into an inconsistent token (NFT), thereby becoming the owner no longer a physical, but digital image.

The non -replaceable token is unique, it cannot be replaced by anything, unlike bitcoin, which can be exchanged for another, and it will be exactly the same. Most NFT are part of the Etherium blockchain, the same cryptocurrency as Bitcoin, but its blockchain supports NFT, which store additional information. NFT gives you the right to own the work itself in the digital version. For example, everyone can buy Aivazovsky’s reproduction, but only one person can own the original. Token is unique, like the original picture. For example, the Canadian singer Graims sold a collection of short videos with her songs in the amount of $ 5.8 million at one of the auctions.

The non -replaceable token is unique, it cannot be replaced by anything, unlike bitcoin

In fact, NFT can be anything: a video clip or music, but digital images have gained particular popularity. In order for the prices for a new trend, an example: in the game Cryptokitties, whose users could trade virtual kittens, the user paid $ 170 thousand for the image of a kitten. By the way, the famous GIF Nyan Cat was also converted into NFT and sold for 590 thousand dollars. All over the world, auctions specializing in digital art objects have already appeared, with several zeros on price tags.

Sergey Medvedev: Our guest today, blockchain consultant Denis Smirnov will help to understand this complex plot. Honestly, I spent the evening and night, reading about NFT technology. What is its essence? How can you sell a ten-second video clip for six million dollars, or is the picture left, in my opinion, for 70 million? What is Haip?

Denis Smirnov: Partly. Here we see a combination of several factors at once, and first of all, we really talk about the revolution, and the revolution is about the same as the technology of printing at one time. Conditional NFT is approximately the same technology that will also change the world of media, including contemporary art. NFT is a technology implemented on the blockchain, that is, on a decentralized database, the peculiarity of which is that the information that was placed in it once is more impossible to change in any way. Thanks to this property, the blockchain allows you to solve one of the fundamental problems of human interactions - the problem of trust. We cannot interact between different people without certain intermediaries. We cannot, for example, transfer large amounts of money without a bank, to carry out real estate transactions without a state in the person of a notaries and the like. The blockchain allows you to solve this problem, to endure the issue of trust in brackets and unequivocally trust not the reputation of other people or organizations, but the cryptography on the basis of which this technology is built.

Sergey Medvedev: Blockchain is like a large accounting book in which everyone is recorded, and each next coming, signing, tells everyone that confirms all the notes made before him.

Denis Smirnov: Indeed, the easiest analogue from the real world is an accounting book, a barn book, where we can enter any data on the lines, for example, about transactions. It is important that each page also contains a special digital code, which is calculated from the information that is on this page. In addition to this information, it also contains a reference to the previous page.

Sergey Medvedev: That is, each record contains all the previous records?

Denis Smirnov: Not all the previous ones, but only the label that we can calculate only knowing the data that were in the system before. Therefore, in order to change some information in the blockchain, we need to change not only a specific line, but also change all the pages that were added after that, which in turn makes the same change impossible. Indeed, in addition to the fact that we will have to recount all the added pages, it is still a decentralized barn book, it is stored at a time at a huge number of participants, and therefore an attempt to change any information in it will fail, since the participants will immediately learn about this and return it to the correct state. Thus, now we have the opportunity to maintain information about different transactions, whether it is the transfer of some values between people (Bitcoin works) or much more widely used technologies, such as the Etherium platform, or “ether”, as they say in Russia, which is, in fact, a large decentralized computer, which gives the opportunity to immediately on a huge device, making them absolutely absolutely protected from external interventions. And these programs can contain almost any logic, including, for example, information about any tokens that can be replaced: we are used to it, so most cryptocurrencies or paper money familiar to us work.

Sergey Medvedev: Relatively speaking, bitcoins are interchangeable units, one bitcoin is equal to another bitcoin, here you sold it, bought it, and it does not matter to whom it belongs, he passes from hand to hand. And here, as I understand it, with Etherium, with this NFT technology is a unique token, which is only one in the world. Accordingly, we can identify them some work of art. This is an analogue of copyright: the whole world indicates that I am the owner of this picture.

Denis Smirnov: In fact, NFT-Token is a smart contract, a program launched on a blockchain, where we can add any additional information, in which we can put either an agreement on ownership, or simply a receipt that one or another object, for example, is a digital or real world belongs to someone. The right -offer is attached to this token.

This is an analogue of copyright: the whole world indicates that I am the owner of this picture

Sergey Medvedev: Say, real estate right: can I draw up a real estate contract through the NFT technology?

Denis Smirnov: This is possible technically, but there are certain reservations from a legal point of view. Financial legal technologies are quite inertial, they often do not keep up with the development of progress. I am practically sure that over time we will come to this format when, with the help of tokenized objects, we can interact with the objects of the real world, and with property rights, and even with some physical objects. Moreover, where this does not concern traditional jurisprudence, this is happening now, including close to objects of both digital and real art. The Hermitage not so long ago announced that one of the upcoming exhibitions will be devoted to NFT art, and all the objects physically represented in the museum will also exist in the form of NFT tokens in the blockchain.

Sergey Medvedev: What is NFT art and cryptoart? Is this a digital work of art, or can it be some kind of physical object?

Denis Smirnov: It can be either a physical object and an object of the digital world. The only problem is that physical reality often does not keep up with technology changes so quickly. Therefore, to date, NFT art is the mass of its still digital art.

Sergey Medvedev: So, it was created in the number, on the one hand, and on the other hand, his copyright is recorded. Say, the JPEG picture was created by someone with a certain artistic resource, Banksy creates some kind of JPEG, but we do not know who it belongs. This picture can be distributed by a billion of copies, each of which will have the same value, and all this together will strive for zero. This is what Walter Benjamin spoke of in his famous work of 1936 "The problem of the work of art in the era of his technical reproduction." The picture of Rembrandt was unique, it was impossible to reproduce in the same form, and Bresson’s photographs can be printed a lot, and it is not clear how to appreciate them.

As I understand it, this technology takes a single JPEG file, says that it is unique and original, because a completely enchanting amount of money is paid for it: respect its owner and author of this picture. Is that so?

Denis Smirnov: Almost yes. We have been accustomed to the fact that in the digital world, unlike the real world, where almost all objects are non -replaced, we had to get used to the fact that digital objects are just exactly the same, a copy of the original, because they are the same in bytes. NFT just returns the whole story closer to the real world, making it possible to unequivocally distinguish one specific original among the whole variety of objects and further use it as the very expression, for example, property rights to this object.

Moreover, the fact that a huge number of copies remain is in no way interfering with this whole system. Moreover, it only increases the cost of the original product. Say, I have a reproduction of Jean-Michel Baskia on my T-shirt, the original of which is hanging in a museum in Brooklyn. At the same time, the fact that I use the reproduction of this work, if I think about it, in relation to the original, it only increases its cost, because the price of contemporary art is determined by the cult context of it. And the more popular it or another work in conditions when we can unequivocally determine that one or another object is the original in the digital world, it works only to increase its value. Therefore, it is not at all scary that this object can be pulled out, copy, propagated by any number of copies: the original will always remain, and we will have information about this, which will remain in the blockchain.

Sergey Medvedev: Why is it worth such a lot of money? I heard that now crypto -components rose very much by money, given the explosive growth of Bitcoin over the past six months. They simply invest this money, pumping even more hype in cryptote technology, in blockchain technology, saying: look, here some virtual objects are created that are sold for $ 70 million?

Denis Smirnov: There is such a story. Moreover, the same object of digital art we are talking about is actually not just a JPEG picture, but the result of the work of one of the digital artists for several years.

Sergey Medvedev: 5000 days, he created it every day.

Denis Smirnov: A person who bought this work for $ 69 million is precisely the representative of the same cohort of modern cryptos, crypto -milliarders, a famous Indian supporter of cryptocurrencies who invested in this story.

Speaking of the current state of the market, this can be correlated to some extent with an inflated bubble. Here it is more correct to look not at its current state, but at the prospects that NFT gives for the existing media business. I mean the whole global media business - these are photographs, and digital art objects, and films, and music, and so on: they all have the problem of copyright, both from the publishers and from the manufacturers of content.

NFT is, in fact, a smart contract, a program into which a very definite logic can be sewn up

Let's not forget that NFT is, in fact, a smart contract, a program into which a very definite logic can be sewn. For example, a situation that is quite standard for the world of art, when an artist who is engaged in the production of content, after transferring it to the curator or copyright holder, loses all rights to him and ceases to receive income from this, in the case of NFT it can be dramatically changed. In this logic, we can sew up, for example, a model in which the Content creator, in any operation with this token, will receive some kind of royalties. This will be regardless of who belongs to the token and at what cost it is transmitted: the original author will always receive these deductions. And such a logic can be arbitrarily complex. You can sew there scenarios that we, in principle, cannot imagine today.

Sergey Medvedev: It turns out we get an inalienable copyright?

Denis Smirnov: Not just inalienable, otherwise copyright that can count on a certain share of deductions.

Sergey Medvedev: Because it will be spelled out in all further transactions with this work of art, a preliminary unique token will be sewn, which will say that deductions are needed.

Denis Smirnov: That's right.

Sergey Medvedev: argues Alexei Falin , co -founder of the Rarible project (this is the fourth in the world a platform for the purchase and sale of digital art).

Alexey Falin: This is a plus for the authors, because when you are not tied to physical objects, you have much more opportunities for moving, life in different places. In addition, now the pandemic of coronavirus, and we have many artists on the platform who have lost the opportunity to exhibit their paintings in galleries - it was their main earnings. And they found for themselves a new source of income through the sale of digital paintings. In any case, this is an additional degree of freedom.

It turns out that a digital picture is even more expensive than the picture in reality

Digital objects have an interesting property: they are more expensive than real objects, simply because they are much easier to store, sell and resell. And from the point of view of the pleasure of ownership - absolutely the same. It turns out that a digital picture is even more expensive than a picture in reality, it can be ten times more expensive. There is a certain hype, because everything is only new. Accordingly, if you have a picture that was the first digital in its class, of course, its value will only grow over time. Therefore, everything is so expensive.

Sergey Medvedev: Let's imagine how a simple person can create and sell digital art. Here, for example, I will take out the phone and take off the two of us. We will try to make digital art from this selfie and sell it. What will we need to do?

Denis Smirnov: This is not difficult enough. We will need primarily the device itself that will create this object of digital art. Then there are several ways. The most universal, but it is the most difficult-we need a small smart contract code, freely available on the Internet, which we can easily and simply expand the Ether network. Or we can take advantage of one of the many sites to create tokens: tokenization of existing art.

Sergey Medvedev: That is, we first need to make an account on some kind of crypto-story, bring money there and buy a certain number of "broadcasts" on them.

Denis Smirnov: When we are talking about NFT and decentralized finances, it is more correct to talk about the ecosystem of the "broadcast". It is far from one in the world, there are a huge number of cryptocurrency platforms that compete quite seriously. The Ether simply appeared before the rest and became the most convenient tool for creating a new decentralized economy.

A decentralized economy is a huge movement, the purpose of which is to build a copy of the existing financial system, but completely devoid of intermediaries. The volume of liquidity, the amount of funds that are now reserved in this ecosystem, beat all records. Over the past year, the amount of assets inside it has grown from almost a billion dollars to the current almost 55, while it continues to grow quite stably. Here we are not talking about some kind of hype, but about the demand for those very financial instruments, to the traditional analogues of which a huge part of people may not even have access.

In order to interact with the Ether ecosystem, with this global decentralized computer, we need, first of all, to have some of its so-called base token. This is the very cryptocurrency of the "ether", the cost of which today already exceeds $ 2200 and also continues to strive up. Она нужна нам: любое действие, которое происходит в экосистеме, требует денег, уплаты специальной комиссии, потому что тот код, который мы запускаем в этой экосистеме, одновременно выполняется на компьютерах всех участников сети. Естественно, они не готовы поставлять свои вычислительные мощности бесплатно, хотят что-то получать в обмен на это. И они получают базовую криптовалюту, базовый токен "Эфира", а нам этот токен нужен для того, чтобы запускать смарт-контракты. Проще всего это сделать через одну из крупных криптовалютных бирж, заведя там аккаунт и купив небольшое количество этого "Эфира".

Дальше, обладая этим кошельком в экосистеме, мы можем воспользоваться одной из существующих платформ. Например, платформа Rarible предоставляет очень удобный интерфейс по созданию этого токена. А дальше сама механика ничуть не отличается от создания нового сообщения имейла или записи на форуме. У нас есть несколько полей для ввода текста, есть поле, в которое мы можем загрузить наш объект цифрового искусства: в нашем случае – фотографию или короткий видеоролик, указать некоторое количество так называемых метаданных, то есть, в принципе, любую информацию, которая может как-то сопровождать этот NFT. Это может быть ссылка на коллекцию в реальном музее, на документ в распределенной сети для хранения и все что угодно.

Сергей Медведев: И как выставить на торг?

Денис Смирнов: После этого мы нажимаем кнопочку "создать", транзакция отправляется в сеть, смарт-контракт разворачивается, и на наш кошелек поступает тот самый NFT-токен, который мы в дальнейшем вправе использовать так, как нам хочется: например, разместить в виде аукциона на любой из платформ.

Физические ресурсы из реального мира перекачиваются в мир виртуальный, становятся виртуальными и преображают нашу жизнь!

Сергей Медведев: То есть мы купили произведение искусства за NFT-токен, привязали его к NFT-токену, и с уникальным токеном мы объявляем, скажем, в фейсбуке аукцион: смотрите, мы продаем наше селфи, которое сделали в студии Радио Свобода, кто сколько за него предложит? Дальше фиксируется максимальная цена, человек за эту цену получает уникальный токен и говорит: смотрите, я стал владельцем этого уникального объекта.

Денис Смирнов: И факт наличия этого токена на его кошельке как раз и показывает то самое правовладение: он в текущий момент является правообладателем этого объекта.

Сергей Медведев: Где еще будет эффективно использоваться блокчейн-технология?

Денис Смирнов: Важно уточнить, говорим ли мы о блокчейне в целом (здесь довольно много сфер применения) или про NFT. These are a little different things. NFT – это, скорее всего, история, которая приведет к достаточно революционным изменениям во всем: во-первых, в медиабизнесе, во-вторых, в цифровом искусстве. В-третьих, это достаточно популярный сейчас рынок игровых активов, ведь существует огромное количество онлайн игр, где есть игровые предметы. Более того, вокруг этих игровых предметов уже сегодня существует достаточно большой рынок, который пока, к сожалению, просто не является сколь-либо оформленным. Но при этом технологии не стоят на месте, и такие крупные проекты, как, например, "Майнкрафт", уже заявили, что большая часть активов, которые будут находиться внутри этих игр, может быть токенизирована.

Это в свою очередь приведет к тому, что, во-первых, эти активы станут кросс-проектными, потому что использовать этот актив можно будет не только внутри самой игры, его можно будет, как обычный NFT-токен, выставить на аукцион, продать на какой-нибудь торговой платформе. А со временем появится возможность использовать такие активы в самых разных проектах: скажем, какой-нибудь легендарный меч из одной игры может быть использован в другой. Например, известный проект "криптокотята", который как раз и обозначил собой рост интереса к NFT-токенам: уже сейчас есть проекты, использующие этих котят для того, чтобы создать виртуального питомца в какой-либо компьютерной игре.

Сергей Медведев: Сколько может стоить такой криптокотенок?

Денис Смирнов: По-разному. Насколько я помню, во времена первого хайпа в 2017–18 годах один из самых дорогих котят был продан примерно за 150 тысяч долларов, что по текущим меркам, конечно, довольно мало, но на тот момент это было дорого. Опять же, здесь важно смотреть не на текущую стоимость, а именно на возможность применения самой технологии, когда мы сможем иметь актив, который будет не задействован в каком-то конкретном проекте, а может существовать кросс-медийно на самых разных площадках. Еще одним из достаточно серьезных векторов развития блокчейн-технологий является так называемая Метавселенная, то есть виртуальные миры, где мы тоже можем обладать какой-либо собственностью, например, землей или домом, построенным на земле.

Сергей Медведев: Это игровые вселенные – грубо говоря, большая игра "Монополия": в этой игре мы покупаем за живые фиатные деньги какую-то улицу, дом или бассейн. Это удивительный мир NFT-технологий, блокчейн-технологий, когда мы видим, как реальные физические ресурсы из реального мира перекачиваются в мир виртуальный, становятся виртуальными и преображают нашу жизнь!