Physicality is a bug, not a feature
Beeple
The fact that you can’t hang the art on the wall is beside the point, they contend. “Physicality is a bug, not a feature,” says Tyler. “There was no scarcity in ones and zeroes until you enter with the blockchain.”
Put another way: Anyone can view a Beeple on Instagram. But blockchain makes it collectible.
Duncan Cock Foster—that’s seriously the family name—and his brother had launched Nifty Gateway with the hope of mainstreaming the market for NFTs, which had been complicated to buy and sell. (Most marketplaces required users to have Ethereum wallets.) For the December auction of Beeple’s work, they’d hoped to generate $500,000 in sales for the weekend. But when they crushed that number on Friday night, things started to get interesting. Cock Foster had been monitoring the proceedings from his apartment in New York’s Chinatown and was stunned—by the total figures but also by what this drop meant for the crypto scene. “We all felt like we were witnessing history,” he says. “This is one of the things, in retrospect, where people will say: How did we miss this?” Continue
