Decentralised Art — An exploration in Digital Assets.
What is Ethereum
Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether (ETH) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin. Ethereum is the most actively used blockchain.
What is Ethereum Smart Contracts
A smart contract is a self-executing contract with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. The code and the agreements contained therein exist across a distributed, decentralized blockchain network. The code controls the execution, and transactions are trackable and irreversible.
Smart contracts permit trusted transactions and agreements to be carried out among disparate, anonymous parties without the need for a central authority, legal system, or external enforcement mechanism.
While blockchain technology has come to be thought of primarily as the foundation for bitcoin, it has evolved far beyond underpinning the virtual currency.
Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Ethereum also allows for the creation of unique and indivisible tokens that cannot be directly exchanged for one another, called non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Since these types of tokens are unique, they have been used to represent digital art, sports memorabilia, virtual real estate and gaming. NFTs generally sell on the Ethereum blockchain through various digital auction websites. In 2021, Christie’s began to sell NFT artwork.
A NFT (non-fungible token) is a special cryptographically-generated token that uses blockchain technology to link with a unique digital asset that cannot be replicated.
Non-fungible tokens differ from popular cryptocurrencies such as Ether (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), which are fungible; for example, you can exchange one Bitcoin for any other Bitcoin.
Although the usage of NFTs has spread in various industries, they’re synonymously associated with the gaming and digital collectibles sectors and are most commonly found as a specific Ethereum token built on the ERC-721 standard. However, in 2021, their use is starting to spread to other blockchains like Binance Smart Chain’s BEP-721 protocol.
Characteristics of Non-Fungible Tokens
- Rare — The value of NFTs comes from their scarcity. Although NFT developers can create any amount of non-fungible tokens, they often limit the tokens to increase rarity.
- Indivisible — Although not set in stone, most non-fungible tokens are indivisible into smaller units. You either purchase the entire amount of, say, a digital art piece, or purchase no art at all.
- Unique — This is perhaps the most significant characteristic of them all. NFTs have a permanent information tab that records their uniqueness. Think of this information as a certificate of authenticity.
Advantages of NFTs
Non-fungible tokens bring a new dimension to digital interactions.
The three leading advantages of NFTs are:
- They’re transferable — Unlike exchange-traded fungible tokens, NFTs are bought or sold on special marketplaces. However, their value depends on their uniqueness.
- They’re authentic — Blockchain technology powers non-fungible tokens. Therefore, you know that your NFT is genuine, since it’s nearly impossible to create counterfeits with a decentralized immutable ledger.
- They preserve ownership rights — Again, this refers to an NFT’s use of decentralized platforms where no owner can alter the data once committed.
Non-Fungible Token Use Cases
Gaming
NFTs are popular in the gaming industry since these tokens solve some of its inherent problems. For example, top games such as Fortnite prohibit the sale of rare traits and accessories such as weapons and skins.
However, with NFTs, these features can easily be transferred and used in different games. As such, non-fungible tokens can help drive in-game economies.
Digital Assets
Think of Decentraland. Here, participants can buy virtual land. Another example that is closer to home is ENS (Ethereum Name Service), which uses NFTs for its .ETH domains to facilitate buying and selling.
Identity
NFTs are ideal for fighting identity theft. Examples of things that can be digitized to represent identity include academic qualifications, medical records and even our appearances.
Furthermore, digital artists can turn their work into NFTs for copyright purposes.
NFT’s use to prove identity includes converting physical game tickets into non-fungible tokens to weed out counterfeits.
Collectibles
NFTs bring a new dawn to the collectible world. Consequently, conventional collectors are now onto digital assets.
About Fakin Surreal
We are developing Smart Contracts into Ethereum’s Blockchain. The Fakin Surreal Token (FST) is a ERC-721 smart contract that lives into Blockchain.
The Total Supply of FST will be 30 unique one-of-one Tokens for 2021, represented by original photography artwork by Steve Zafeiriou, that exists multidimensionally as an index of files into the inter-planetary file system. These Digital Assets can be collected from your wallet with all metadata on chain.
The full collection will be available until the end of 2021.
The metadata of every individual token that minted can store names, descriptions, images and artributes. Every collection is unique and will never exists as a copy.
Because every collection is a new Fakin Surreal Token as mentioned before, the collectors have the ability to track in real time their assets through it’s public ledger. The public ledger can be found here:
https://etherscan.io/address/0xfbe26364dd685b2260ee27105b7c5c7a1b8236fa
Collectors are free to bid on/buy/sell/trade their assets and increase their profits into the largest Marketplaces such as Opensea, Rarible etc. The token, gains value as the ownership history increases.
