Throughout 2021, the arts and creative industries would become the focus of the latest trend in blockchain technology with something called NFT’s – non-fungible tokens, something that would essentially provide digital ownership of a piece of artwork. It came off the back of the growing decentralized currency trends at the time with rising cryptocurrency services like those found at non uk casino options, and similarly the more well-known NFTs came with a price tag to match their crypto counterparts as some would reach tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for essentially, well, nothing. But is the art NFT fad coming to an end?

The first emergence of NFTs was way back in 2014 with the artwork Quantum, and whilst some other projects did emerge over the years none were really able to gain that much traction despite also remaining within the art space – it’s not really known why art became the chosen format to grow, but given the large amount of digital art and how easy it is to share, being able to attribute “ownership” of a piece of digital art gives a way to separate the original piece from the copies that would be shared online.

It was able to gain enough traction that one piece of art, Beeple, sold for a record breaking $69 million and making the artist the third highest earning by any currently living artist, breaking ground in the NFT market and giving hope to investors that were suggesting NFTs would be the next big thing – issues were quickly found, however, much as would be expected digital art work was still being copied and the NFT owners were still in lack of a better word, irrelevant – there was nothing but the blockchain stating that this individual owned the item, and did nothing to stop other users from simply copying and saving or editing the image anyway.

There were still a large group of investors that stuck around and some who felt the NFT market was worth pursuing and gave birth in late 2021 and early 2022 to the Bored Ape NFT market, a piece of artwork that was being customized for each individual buyer for a unique product for each but quickly fell out of scope of being about art and was more about the money involved.

For now the NFT market has slowed, and has moved away from art and into gaming and music primarily, but there are still some hanging on to the hopes that the NFT market will remain just as big – but for some time the art industry as a whole got caught up in the wave of blockchain, and may be part of it for some time yet to come.