I work in the technology space, so I had heard of NFTs back when they were called Colored Coins, but I hadn’t really come across any specific artwork that was interesting enough to buy vs just downloading and setting as my computer’s wallpaper. When I found out that the Toxic Avenger NFT from Troma was going to be released, I was really interested in checking it out. Click here to see the listing.
If you’re not aware what an NFT is, it stands for Non-Fungible Token. Let’s look at a $20 US Dollar bill example. A $20 bill has the same spending power as any other $20 bill. With a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, 1 Bitcoin is pretty much worth what another 1 Bitcoin is worth. With an NFT, it’s unique, because things like artwork are not fungible. One Picasso painting is not worth the same as any other painting. An artist creates digital artwork and stores the ownership rights of that particular art piece onto the blockchain, with the most popular Smart Contract blockchain being Ethereum. You don’t necessarily own the rights to reproduce the artwork, but you down own the rights to that specific piece of artwork. Just as if you own a Picasso painting, you can sell your physical copy of that painting to anybody that you like. So think of an NFT as artwork on the blockchain. NFTs have been around for a few years and recently started gaining popularity around 2019.
So you might be asking yourself why anybody would want to own one of these things? Couldn’t you just download the image and keep a copy on your hard drive for free? Yes, you can do that, but then what’s the difference between owning an official Picasso painting and a reproduction? The market is very nascent and we aren’t really sure how well these will perform in the future. I wouldn’t recommend investing much into them, but spending a few bucks see what it’s like to walk through the NFT ownership process is kind of fun. Especially when you get to own an official piece of something as cool as the Toxic Avenger.
Click here to see proof of the Smart Contract behind the scenes that verifies which address has ownership. I’ve linked to the artwork that I bought below. Enjoy!
