Important developments in the digitization of all kinds of assets have been proliferating and growing each week. In this newsletter, we highlight some of these new developments.
Making money from viral images:
Memes that go viral have never been able to pay-out their creators, until now.
Zoe Roth, now 21, is the girl slyly smiling in this image as a house burns down behind her. She was 4 years old when her father, an amateur photographer snapped this photo which featured a controlled burn planned by local firefighters in January of 2005. He then entered it into JPG magazine’s “Emotion Capture” contest where it lived on its website ever since and became one of social media’s most persistent memes. Recently, as the acronym NFT or non-fungible token has become a household word, Zoe learned that she could monetize her famous image and hired an attorney and manager to help with the logistics. On April 16th, “Disaster Girl” sold on auction for 180 ETH, worth approx. $430,000 at that time (~$525,000 today). On top of this windfall, Roth and her father baked into the NFT smart contract a 10% royalty so that if/when the image is resold, they will get their share of the proceeds into perpetuity.
The website AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com is home to exactly that, those frightening and cringe-worthy, family photos. Over the last 12 years, people have uploaded their embarrassing photos for the world to see and get a laugh. Many of these have gone viral and now the founders of Awkward Family Photos have partnered with the family members of the top ten most viral photos and have turned them into collectible digital art. They released the NFT collection entitled, “Super Awkward Drop” on April 14th on Foundation.
Not surprisingly, as the NFT market continues to expand, viral videos which “represent some of the biggest cultural moments on the internet” are now also looking to get into the tokenizing business. Talent management company, Night Media and user-generated content licensing business Jukin Media are launching a joint venture called Views to “support creators and celebrate these iconic videos.” Looks like everywhere you turn, NFTs have become the preferred route in monetizing content.
The World’s First NFT Property on Sale Now:
A home located at 221 Dryden Street in Thousand Oaks California is on the market for sale. This is not an exciting story, but what is interesting is the fact that the new owner of this property will end up with not just a physical property, but an NFT image of the home entitled Flying in Colors designed by award-winning artist, Kii Arens as well. The digital art piece reflects the front image of the home with the San Gabriel Mountains in the backdrop popping up in stages behind it; day turns to night with a moon, stars, and flying saucers zooming into view. The movement of the art along with its neon colors, without a doubt, make this home a one of a kind! Is this the frontier of our physical and digital worlds colliding?
The home is listed on Redfin and the digital artwork is available on opensea.io with minimum bid at 520 ETH. Click this LINK to watch the digital video image.
NFTs as Patents:
Patents are unique like artwork and thus, making them into NFTs seems like a natural fit. Through NFT technology, patents that are typically hard to find, sell, and trade, can now become liquid and offer much greater value to companies.
IBM’s blockchain group has partnered with IPwe, an intellectual property specialist, to convert intellectual assets into non-fungible tokens. IBM has been working with corporate clients on their tech efforts for some time, but now they will be providing the infrastructure for turning valuable patents into NFTs and storing the information on a blockchain network. The technology of NFTs allows industries of all sorts to take advantage of building a smart contract into their proprietary information. In some instances, an employee may be offered an incentive package that could include a commission for a design of a product, such that the employee could be written into the NFT contract and could forever own a small percentage of its future sales. This inherent ability to fractionalize ownership is another benefit to converting patents into NFTs. Additionally, because the history of the patent would be captured on the blockchain, analysts and researchers will easily ascertain its background ownership, licensing deals etc. In the case of patents, IBM and IPwe said in a joint statement: “The tokenization of intellectual property (IP) will help position patents to be more easily sold, traded, commercialized, or otherwise monetized and bring new liquidity to this asset class for investors and innovators.”
The digitization of everything keeps intensifying with a broad acceptance of Non-Fungible Tokens; we are truly at the adoption phase. Let us know your thoughts!
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Stay Curious!
~NFT Art Source