NFTs – “The birth of a creative economy”

In a Bloomberg interview, The CEO of Verisart, Robert Norton explained how he believed that NFTs were a “wake-up call for the creator economy” and that there was a “new generation willing to purchase art as an NFT”. 

Norton told how he was in a Clubhouse chat with Beeple and others at the same time as bids were being made on the digital artist’s work called “The first 5000 days”.  

He said that all the chat participants were polled on how much the art work would finally sell for. One of the participants suggested $50 million which was “laughed out of the room” according to Norton. However, when the final sum of $69 million was announced everyone was completely amazed. 

“I think there’s this kind of collective shock that’s running through the industry at the moment in terms of how much someone is willing to pay for a jpeg” 

Norton continued by saying how he thought the NFT market had become “overhyped” and “frothy”, but that it was more important to recognise the underlying use of blockchain to “certify and verify creative assets”. 

When asked if he thought that digital art would go for even higher prices in the future, Norton replied:  

“we are living in unprecedented times currently, and this new generation of crypto collectors are very comfortable collecting digital art” 

He commented on how the NFT market had grown from around $20 million at the end of last year, to a figure of $1 billion just recently. He stated that NFTs were bringing new participants into the market to buy their first NFT even before they had bought any other virtual currency. 

On whether Norton thought that the crypto space was in fact “hijacking the art market” in order to hype cryptocurrency in general. He replied that he thought digital art was a significant movement and that it was too big to be much affected by any market manipulation. 

Norton finished by saying that Verisart was concerned about fraud in the digital art world and that it was providing a platform for verifying each piece of art, whether that be the art itself, or whether it was properly attributed to the artist who had created it. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.