How you can make money from memes, tweets

How you can make money from memes, tweets

Do you remember the artist who sold around $6 million (about (Sh600 million) worth of digital artworks after putting them up for auction online early last year? Grimes? Well, the tech world is still perplexed about the phenomenon that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have become.

 NFT is a digital asset. Just like tangible assets are exchanged for money or other goods, digital assets can be bought and sold online, especially with cryptocurrency.

The idea that value is exchanged online is premised on the authenticity and security almost guaranteed by blockchain technology.

Buyers may not get to hang these digital pieces on their wall, but they might get bragging rights for a meme like the Nyan cat that sold for $600,000 (about Sh60 million) or something from a popular artist like Grimes.

Artists and musicians like Beeple and 3LAU who have sold $3.5 million (about Sh350 million) and $11 million (about Sh1 billion) worth of art respectively through Nifty Gateway last year are not the only beneficiaries as NFTs widen the spectrum of collectibles for example now memes and tweets are a commodity.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and CEO, auctioned his first ever tweet as an NFT originally uploaded on March 21, 2006 and read “just setting up my twttr”. The tweet was bought after a final bid of $2.9 million (about Sh290 million) via the online platform Valuables.

In Kampala, the Uganda Museum has partnered with Murcom to create a digital display of NFTs. The firm will set up an online web page that will be used to display professional photos of the different items and convert them into digital artworks after which we shall apply these digital artworks on the blockchain and create NFTs.

Time magazine warns that at face value, the whole enterprise seems absurd: big-money collectors paying six to eight figures for works that can often be seen and shared online for free. Critics have also dismissed the NFT art craze as just the latest bubble, akin to this year’s boom-and-bust mania around “meme stocks” like GameStop, DogeCoin and Bitcoin.

It may be but many digital artists and content creators, fed up after years of creating content that generates visits and engagement on platforms like Facebook and Instagram while getting almost nothing in return, will be glad to dive into this.

These artists of all kinds — authors, musicians, filmmakers, graphic designers, illustrators, even Easter egg hunters — envision a future in which NFTs transform both their creative process and how the world values art, now that it’s possible to truly “own” and sell digital art for the first time.”

However it may also be just a bubble escalated by “crypo-grifters” as highly criticised, regardless this still possess legal questions to be answered considering we are in the wave of the fourth industrial revolution.

 In what is arguably Kenya’s first NFT auction, marathon champion Eliud Kipchoge auctioned off two images of his career highlights for $37,351.07 (about Sh4 million) NFTs may as well not be considered a bad investment, therefore visit your lawyer to discuss the intellectual rights you hold over your tweets and TikTok videos and how best to plan your digital asset estate.

Morris Atungonza, Nandi