“I’ve experimented by purchasing a few PFP NFTs, looking at them less as an investment and more as a way to learn about these different projects’ communities and because I’ve liked the particular piece,” said Nikhil Basu Trivedi, co-founder of venture capital group Footwork, whose Twitter PFP is a heavily pixelated smoking figure with red sunglasses. Video: Soaring NFT sales redraw the art market | FT Film After complaints that CryptoPunks had failed to be diverse by skewing largely towards male avatars and not including non-binary avatars, a collection called ExpansionPunks was created based on the CryptoPunk aesthetic but seeking to address those issues. For example, owning a CryptoPunk, a collection launched by Larva Labs consisting of algorithmically generated pixellated faces, often signals an affinity with libertarian politics and concerns about censorship. Many collections come with perks, such as invites to private chat rooms on messaging apps Discord or Telegram or passes to exclusive parties and meetups.Īll collections have their own distinct identities and flair.
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While there are many emerging use cases for NFTs, such as establishing royalties for music, typically NFT PFPs are avatars of human or animal faces - from cats to penguins to apes - and the most popular cost and trade at hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
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“Profile pics in general have always been a way for us to represent ourselves digitally . . . what community we’re part of . . . in the same way we wear clothing,” says Mikhael Naayem, co-founder and chief business officer of Dapper Labs, a blockchain company that makes the CryptoKitties NFT collection and NBA Top Shots, digital tokens representing basketball game highlights. It comes as the wider market for NFTs - essentially digital ownership certificates registered on an immutable blockchain - surged to more than $40bn in 2021, in what critics have cast as a speculative bubble. Tech executives, venture capitalists and crypto enthusiasts alike are wielding them to showcase their allegiance to a particular artist or collection or convey wealth, status and online clout. And that to me is the most interesting use of the technology.”įield is one of a new breed of investors on the West Coast in the burgeoning digital art world, combining tech savviness and finance chops not just to collect works to flip for profit, but also to hold and display, often as their profile picture (PFP) on Twitter, as Field does.
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He has since built up a porfolio of about 600 NFTs from various collections and artists, many of which are about more than investment: some NFTs can operate like “participatory art experiments”, he says, where buyers can get involved in creating new art together. He had bought the CryptoPunk, a pixellated blue alien avatar smoking a pipe, several years before the market mania - for around $15,000.
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In early 2021, Dylan Field, chief executive of San Francisco-based design software group Figma, sold a digital collectible - a non-fungible token (NFT) - for more than $7.5mn.