WHAT IS NFT?
We would like to briefly talk about the NFTs for those who do not know about them yet, or for those who need a clear definition again despite of hearing a lot. The non-tradable token, or non-fungible token (NFT for short), is a unit of data stored in a digital ledger called a blockchain, which confirms that a digital asset is unique and therefore not interchangeable.
Most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. However, it should be noted that other blockchains may also implement their own versions of NFT.
A recent report from NonFungible.com, a company that publishes market information on NFTs, says that in 2020, NFT trading is over $250 million by increasing almost 300 percent from the previous year.
If you say that I have only used the words token and chain so far and ask what this NFT is: actually it can be many things. A lot of things such as an iconic tweet, a widely shared video, a digital artwork, or a photograph, can be offered to sell as an NFT. For example, Lebron James’ slam dunk video NFT sold through the NBA Top Shot application was sold for $77 thousand; Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweet was sold for $2.9 million. Elon Musk is one of those who keep up with this trend. Musk auctioned off his tweet, which he shared with a GIF, as an NFT. The number of participants in the NFT trend from Turkey is also increasing day by day. Artist Tarık Tolunay’s work ‘Fractal Istanbul – Pandemi’ became the first art work in Turkey to be turned into NFT and sold.
Blockchain technology is a very important technology for creating NFTs. Cryptography is used to chain blocks to a growing list of records. Each block is locked to the previous block with a cryptographic hash or a string of characters that uniquely identifies a dataset. This design makes it very difficult to change the transaction data stored on the blockchain.
So What Makes NFTs So Special?
NFTs have unique IDs and other metadata that no other token can copy. NFT is the method that securely distinguishes the original and unique version of the work from other digital copies, allowing the work to be bought, sold, or verified as authentic on a public blockchain network. Thus, Token, which is the technology used by cryptocurrencies, is used to register the originality of works of art or collectibles.
NFT or Physical Artwork?
Is it better to have an NFT or a physical picture? Which will be a more worthwhile investment? It’s hard to know. Some NFTs bring in large sums of money, but not all. As with any new art form, it’s hard to predict what will happen in the next few years. And anyone who invests in NFTs in order to get investment-like profits needs to understand the risks.
“This is a very new territory,” said Diana Wierbicki; partner at Withersworldwide and head of global arts law, about Nft. “It can go up; go down. Like any contemporary type of art: Values are not fixed, so you take risks.”
Charles Morin, Co-Founder of Jumy, said, “Because NFT has full traceability, you can trace the work from the original creator to the last owner. So the artist decides whether he wants commission royalties of up to 5 percent, 10 percent, or up to 50 percent. And Every time the owner of the work changes, you can follow its story, so the artists can get some money from the royalties.”
NFTs IN THE WORLD OF FASHION
What about the fashion world, how has digital fashion been affected by this situation? Luxury brands quickly integrated into the concepts of NFT and Metaverse. We can say that the transformation brought by the pandemic has accelerated the transformation of digital fashion into a multi-million dollar industry. We collected samples of some luxury fashion brands from the industry. We have saved some of them for later in order to be able to examine them in more detail.
The RTFKT Sneakers
RTFKT markası 2019 yılında kuruldu ve sanal spor ayakkabı satışı konusunda uzmanlaştı. 2021 yılının başlarında, The RTFKT brand was founded in 2019 and specializes in selling virtual sneakers. In early 2021, when NFT was getting popular, the business had a collaborative project with “Fewocious,” a popular crypto artist. It designed 3 virtual sneakers where bidders could try on the sneakers via Snapchat and then enter an auction to buy. And the results were very good. The brand was acquired by Nike in late 2021.
The First Luxury Fashion House to Sell Gucci NFT
NFT of the iconic Italian fashion house was not one of its fashion products, but a movie inspired by the “Aria” collection in collaboration with Alessandro Michele. This 4-minute movie sold for $25,000 million at Christie’s auction.
NFT is entering the fashion week!
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, fashion week has turned into a digital format by means of big role playing of NFTs
“French Fashion” and “Haute Couture Federation” has partnered with the “Arianee” platform to create exchangeable NFTs during men’s fashion week fall/summer 2022 in Paris and other high fashion exhibitions.
These tokens give their users access to exclusive designs; One of the collaborating designers is renowned digital fashion artist Richard Haines.
Louis Vuitton and the NFT game
To celebrate its founder’s 200th anniversary on August 4, Louis Vuitton combined fashion and technology by introducing “Louis the Game,” an adventure-style game in which players will have to go through a dollhouse owned by Vivienne.
Apart from that, the players went to different worlds to collect 200 candles to represent the 200th anniversary.
The adventure was made in collaboration with “Beeple”, a popular NFT artist, and included 30 hidden NFTs.
Burberry Sharky B
Luxury clothing brand Burberry has put its NFT collection in the market in, Mythical Games’s Blankos Block Party blockchain game,. New Burberry Blanko,has a shark character named Sharky and TB summer monogram of Blueberry. This design of the brand which has got inspired by Animal Kingdom is an NFT character which can be bought increased or sold.
The interest in NFT has been increasing because a lot of companies in digital platform like Epic Game,The Fabricant and Dress X; have adapted their collections to metaverse quickly.
So are Nfts as innocent as they seem?
There is no use of water or chemical use in the production of NFTs, and are NFTs that seem environmentally friendly because they do not produce waste as innocent as they seem? This title, which is one of the titles that I come across most while doing research, is open to discussion with you.
There are concerns that NFTs are not environmentally friendly because they are based on the same blockchain technology used by some energy-hungry cryptocurrencies. For example, every NFT transaction on the Ethereum network is said to consume the equivalent of the daily energy used by two American households.
For most of today’s blockchain networks, security relies on special computers called “miners” competing to solve complex mathematical puzzles. This is the proof-of-work principle that keeps people from playing with the system and provides incentives to build and maintain it. The miner who solves the math problem first gets a reward paid in virtual coins. Mining requires a lot of computational power, which drives electricity consumption.
Our every move, everything we do, even our email accounts have a carbon footprint, and every machine learning step has a carbon footprint, if you want to calculate your carboon footprint on web you can visit https://mlco2.github.io/impact/#learn
Metaverse, virtual reality, augmented reality, digital fashion, digital art and NFT are all being done about each and every day. Will the technologies that shape the future gradually enter every part of our lives? We will see how humanity will be shaped, but we can say that all these sensational issues are very dynamic and change every day.
Hope to see you in our next article.