Chidinma Iwu is a writer and strategist who covers all things tech, business, women and crypto. She has written for various publications including the daily dot, the Business of Business, Finder, Let's Eat Cake and more. When she's not writing or seeing a movie, she's doom scrolling on Twitter.
In the past, we could not differentiate the owners of digital artworks from someone who saved a copy of the art from the internet. The lack of clarity of property rights for markets to operate was a problem. But NFTs created an avenue with which creators and consumers can solve this problem by giving them something they can agree represents ownership. This indulges the possibility of building markets around new types of processes which include purchasing products that could never be sold before and allowing more efficient and valuable transactions to hold in dynamic ways.
Historically, the appeal of digital art had been hampered by concerns from collectors on the peculiarity and rarity of digital works as a result of them being duplicated and easily distributed hence making them difficult to price and a possible poor resale value. However, NFTs, which work on blockchain technology just like Bitcoin, have proffered a solution to that problem. The blockchain technology on which NFTs work provides digital ledgers which act as irrevocable proof of ownership, and this ensures that the owner of such art is recognized no matter how much the art is redistributed.
The NFT hype may be seeing a gradual decline as is reflected in the search for the 2021 buzzword. Nevertheless, the concept of digital ownership continues to solidify its presence in digitization as more NFT use cases emerge. From digital creators to investors to financial and real estate markets, different means have been devised to use NFTs in accomplishing set goals.
NFTs are growing in popularity, and so are investments in them. Collecting NFTs is one of the smartest investment choices of 2022, but you would need an NFT wallet to do so. One important factor to note is that the NFT wallet should be able to support the currency you use to buy the NFT. For example, if you're buying an NFT with Ether, the wallet should be able to support the currency.
For decades, the art world has consistently echoed a flagrant devaluation and marginalization of women's work, a defining notion that has made more women disinterested in expounding their art skills. The NFT world is barely 7 years old, but it seems to be already imitating this abnormality. With the way it proposes an unconstrained and more lucrative way to create and sell off artworks, hardly anyone would think that there are only 16% of women artists in NFTs. If you dig further, you'd find that only 5% of NFT sales were accrued by women in the past 21 months.