Last March 11, 2021 was a historic day not only for Blockchain technology, but also for art in general: the famous auction house Christie’s sold the first NFT for more than 69 million dollars. The artist Mike Winkelmann (known on social networks by his pseudonym Beeple) was the author of the auctioned piece, thus becoming the third highest paid living artist in the world, behind Jeff Koons and David Hockney. And all thanks to the power of the Blockchain through non-fungible tokens (NFT). This has generated a more significant boost to this 'new way' of making art, where creators in general are turning to design and coin their projects to make them reach a wider audience without intermediaries and without trust in a new decentralized economy that revolves around the DeFi sector. While NFTs have been around for a couple of years, let's remember 2017 and the Cryptokitties use case on Ethereum Blockchain, which came to congest the network due to the high demand at that time, is not until late 2020 and early 2021 that we have seen a greater explosion in the use of non-fungible tokens. The main use case that we found for these tokens has of course been the world of gaming, mainly dominated by the so-called Metaverses, where platforms such as Decentraland, The Sandbox or Axie Infinity lead the way. However, given the inherent characteristics of NFTs that are wholly owned by digital assets, be it a game or a particular project, artists, creators, musicians and even influencers are turning more and more to their use to monetize their experiences and interact with your audience. Figures that demonstrate an emerging market While there are some skeptics around the NFT boom, the exorbitant and promising numbers that sales in this sector are generating every day should not be discounted. And in this segment, we must clarify that influencers in all their sizes are playing a preponderant role. To show a button: Twitter founder and influencer Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet in the form of NFT for $ 2.3 million on Monday, March 22. Paris Hilton, the former star of the business show, auctioned in August 2020, a drawing of her cat minted in the form of NFT on the Cryptograph platform for 40 ETH, about $ 17,000 at the exchange of the moment. According to Statista, NFT projects in both art and games were worth millions of US dollars in 2020, despite not being the most popular category in Blockchain technology. Despite the multimillion-dollar figures, sales involving NFTs in 2020 in segments such as gaming, art, sports and other segments such as collectibles, among others, were not at the height of 2018, when the figure was 236,648,000 millions of dollars. However, in 2021, taking into consideration the high demand that exists in the sector and the inherent popularity around NFTs and Blockchain technology in general, the market is showing symptoms of surpassing the figures of the last two years. According to the NonFungible.com site, the sales of the entire NFT sector market for the first month of the second quarter, already stands at about 30.2 million dollars, 54% of the total sales in this market during 2020. Key players to consider Definitely, the NFTs are gaining more and more forces in the market, and it is that many artists are commercializing their digital products, driven in addition to the benefits of Blockchain technology, by the isolation situation that the COVID pandemic has subjected the entire world to. 19. As a consequence, the purchase and sale of these tokens is being generated more and more strongly in online platforms, known as Marketplace, where first generation platforms such as Rarible, OpenSea or Coin Ranking, are lagging behind in comparison with user demand who want a simpler and more powerful interface to interact with creators. At this point, the development of products like Showcase, a social platform that uses NFT Badges as the core of its proposal for the interaction between Micro Influencers and fans, under the power of the Blockchain, is causing great attention in the ecosystem, especially in the lovers to the sector of the NFTs. Showcase proposes to open the doors for influencers in the arts in general to connect directly with their fans and at the same time capitalize on the opportunities offered by the combination of NFTs with this influencer-fan interaction. Showcase uses the Blockchain technology proposed by Polygon to handle the high transaction demands and at the lowest cost, thanks to its scalability as an L2 solution on Ethereum. The success of social platforms such as Showcase will be the new path to be marked within the NFT sector, given the social nature that involves the key players within this space: fans and influencers.
