The NFT certificates were “minted” and distributed via the blockchain, through the Polygon network, to the 22 students who completed the most recent Coursera session, Lenz said.

Additional NFT certificates of completion are being created for students who completed Duke Engineering’s blockchain course sequence in earlier sessions

April 2, 2021

Web3 promises rewards — maybe even a kind of justice — for “users”, but Ethereum doesn’t know anything about users, only wallets. One user can control many wallets; one bot can con­trol many wallets; Ethereum can’t tell the difference, doesn’t par­tic­u­larly care. Therefore, Web3’s gov­er­nance tools are appro­pri­ate for decision-making processes that approx­i­mate those of an LLC, but not for anything truly democratic, which is to say, any­thing that respects the uniform, unearned — unearned!—value of per­son­hood.

Web3 is best under­stood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific.

This message was emailed to the Media Lab committee. The assumed audience is subscribers who know roughly what Web3 is supposed to be, but aren’t sure what to think about it. (Here’s more about assumed audiences.)

Ethereum is the locus of most of this work — hey, who named that client library web3.js, anyway?—so it’s not unrea­son­able to read “Web3” as “Ethereum-powered inter­net”.

lit­tle plac­ards up top mak­ing it clear they are aimed at dif­fer­ent groups of read­ers. Those groups might overlap! They might also: not.

the way they push back against the “context collapse” of the internet, in which every pub­lic post is, by default, addressed to everyone.

In ad-based models, revenue is generated more or less uniformly regardless of the fan’s enthusiasm level. As with Substack, NFTs allow the creator to “cream skim” the most passionate users by offering them special items which cost more. But NFTs go farther than non-crypto products in that they are easily sliced and diced into a descending series of pricing tiers. NBA Top Shot cards range from over $100K to a few dollars. Fan of Bitcoin? You can buy as much or little as you want, down to 8 decimal points, depending on your level of enthusiasm. Crypto’s fine-grained granularity lets creators capture a much larger area under the demand curve.

(Note that lowering the intermediary fees can have a multiplier effect on creator disposable income. For example, if you make $100K in revenue and have $80K in costs, cutting out a 50% take rate increases your revenue to $200K, multiplying your disposable income 6x, from $20K to $120K.)

NFTs have received a lot of attention lately because of high sales volumes. In the past 30 days there has been over $300M in NFT sales:

NFTs are the representation of a nonfungible asset in digital media. In a more technical definition, an NFT is a piece of software code that verifies that you hold ownership of a nonfungible digital asset, or the digital representation of the nonfungible physical asset in digital media.

NASCAR

In July this year, Coca-Cola launched branded virtual clothing as nonfungible tokens,

NFTs are compatible with anything built using Ethereum. An NFT ticket for an event can be traded on every Ethereum marketplace, for an entirely different NFT. You could trade a piece of art for a ticket!

And while there are certainly carbon emissions associated with the traditional art world, if the point of blockchain art is to imagine something radically different, he wonders why avoiding climate destruction wouldn’t be at the top of the priority list. “We have to change our existing habits,” Akten says. “So how can we build new platforms that are unsustainable?

The idea is to offer some semblance of the authenticity that is naturally bestowed on physical art.

She changed her mind recently after seeing the interest of artists who had established themselves independently of blockchain hype—people like Lemercier. Some of the NFTs Carlson saw even looked like actual art. “The prices are still totally outrageous,” she adds. But both things can be true at once.

The works were placed for auction on a website called Nifty Gateway, where they sold out in 10 seconds for thousands of dollars. The sale also consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as he later learned from a website called Cryptoart.WTF.

HODL, meaning to 'hold your investment long-term', and gas-fees, which refer to the price paid to ‘crypto-miners’ for transactions to be registered on the public ledger.

Also, NFTs have a feature that you can enable that will pay you a percentage every time the NFT is sold or changes hands, making sure that if your work gets super popular and balloons in value, you’ll see some of that benefit.

Crypto art is art made for the future. As our walls become screens and our field of vision becomes enhanced with augmented reality, we will seek precious and meaningful objects to surround us (just as we always have). Whether in the much anticipated "metaverse," the many digital worlds and games we frequent, or in our own living rooms and peripheral vision, this new generation of art is made for our future.

ransformative economic model for artists via NFT contracts. This is perhaps my favorite advantage of all — the ability for artists to automatically gain a percentage of every sale of their work in the secondary market in perpetuity. I mean, can you imagine!? Artists can evolve from getting ~50% of the initial acquisition price of their work in a gallery to a new world where they get 80%+ (depending on marketplace they use) of the proceeds on their initial sale plus 10–15% of every secondary sale forever! Imagine the families of artists anywhere receiving residuals for generations much like the world's greatest bands as their work continues to grow in value and trade hands. F----ng transformative.

This NFT world is likely the greatest unlock of artist opportunity in 100+ years. This isn't a suboptimal or fringe version of the real-world art economy, it is a vastly improved one.