Digital artists have been quietly launching personal cryptocurrencies.
This article is also available in Chinese.
Over the last few years, I have been involved in the #CryptoArt world, a global community of digital artists variously using blockchain technology in the art field. As part of my immersion in it, I launched First Edition art gallery in March. You can get some very cool pieces at First Edition, including a virtual Dmitri Cherniak, CryptoKitty #12, and the BlockCities Genesis Building. You can also walk through the art gallery in virtual reality and check out osavage’s featured pieces in large format.
This digital artist community has for several years now been an underground laboratory for adoption models of blockchain tech, engaging different aspects of the technology including cryptocurrency, storage and provenance of art work on blockchains, and participating in native sales marketplaces like OpenSea. A lot of digital artists created limited editions of their work on a blockchain-based app called Editional earlier this year, before it became unsupported. Though now off the platform, the artists’ work continues to live on the Ethereum blockchain in the form of standard NFTs — a “nifty” or “non-fungible token” which denotes the ownership of a work — that interoperate under Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard.
Most recently, a number of digital artists familiar with blockchain have used a platform called Roll to launch personal cryptocurrencies. Once you obtain an artist’s personal currency — or “artcoin” — you can redeem it for some of their art works, usually presented as Ethereum NFTs.
Japanese artist Mera Takeru recently issued an artcoin called $GOU, which you can redeem for some of his latest pieces. In turn, OpenSea has begun to accept $GOU as payment; works like Takeru’s “mistakes, compensations, and …” can be purchased with $GOU today on the platform.
Mera Takeru sees the issuance of a personal cryptocurrency as an act of advertising and attracting audiences to his works. “By issuing $GOU, my work has become known to users who had never been interested in art,” he told me. “Thanks to $GOU, my art’s popularity and price have increased.”
Mighty Moose, another creator who produces animated pastiches of text and form as Ethereum NFTs, also sees artcoins as “an opportunity to engage and build a community” in a “mutually beneficial economy where creator and consumer can build together.”
Yelitza Rodriquez, an artist who started tokenizing digital works on Codex Protocol and Editional, was quick to experiment with the artcoin model and is seeing early results. “There has been a noticeable uptick in community engagement,” she says.
Overall, it remains to be seen whether this model of “social currency”, as Roll calls it, is sustainable and will get mass market uptake. And if the model is successful, how will it change the way creators interact with their audiences and communities? Yura Miron, the issuer of the artcoin $YUMI, thinks personal currencies will go as far as to “change how people interact with each other in virtual and real life.”
“And lots of things will happen that none of us can imagine right now,” Yura says.
