Zilliqa set to launch Creators Fund
A Creators Fund will be launched soon to help artists in Singapore product their own digital assets called NFT (non-fungible tokens). Set up by the Singapore blockchain company Zilliqa, it will support emerging artists to display and monetise their works as NFTs.
Zilliqa’s co-CEO Colin Miles said artworks curated for the NFTs can be purchased with tokens and traded in a NFT marketplace. As digital assets recorded on a blockchain, they can be digitally tracked as they are resold or collected again in the future.
“The Creators Fund is a very exciting way for people to crowdsource support for local artists and facilitate their efforts as they create a new world of digital entities,” said Miles at a virtual NFT workshop for the art community held on May 21. The workshop was jointly organised by Y-Lab, an innovation incubator by the National Gallery Singapore and Zilliqa.
More details for the Fund will be released next month.
NFTs have taken the world by storm since the digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold a digital art for a record-setting US$69 million. It was the third highest price ever fetched by any currently living artist.
This has set off the growth spree for the NFT market. In all of 2020, NFT-based artwork sold US$250 million. In the first three months of this year, said Miles, NFT sales exploded to about US$2 billion, a 13,000% growth over 2020.
“This growth, of course, attracts a lot of people to the space, a lot of artists thinking how they can get into NFT,” he added.
Belinda Ang, co-founder of Arto, a social art discovery app, explained during the virtual workshop that NFTs have a big role to play in artist compensation. Artists face challenges as they strive to make a living because there are currently limited avenues for art audience, support and engagement.
“If you want to be an art patron today, you need two prerequisites, one is money, and the other is space. So, while we can work in an art museum we can go online and appreciate art, (but) there are very limited avenues in a traditional art market on how you can support that today.
“So as an art lover, we do not have the space in your home since many of us live in smaller apartments in the cities and we have limited walls where we can put up artworks. We also don’t have enough external spaces in stores that are at the right temperature to place art. We also have very limited avenues to support art.”
Technology has expanded a lot of these options, and that is why NFT is exciting for the art community today. What makes NFTs special is that they are usually one of a kind, she added, the scarcity making the digital asset even more valuable as a collector’s item.
So NFTs is a way for artists to display their work for sale to a wider audience rather rely on art collectors and corporate sponsorship for a living. Absent of walls to display art work, digital assets as bits and bytes only take storage space on a computer. Meanwhile, buyers of digital art gain tamper-proof ownership of the artwork on the blockchain and if the work is one of a kind, they can claim greater value from scarcity and exclusivity.
Income from the sales of NFTs, which can start from US$200, provide a lifeline for artists especially those in developing countries, during the pandemic. This income has helped pay study loans, medical bills and mortgages, said Shelly Soneja, art director of a blockchain mobile game company based in the Philippines.
“A little amount can go a long way for me. Many artists have been uplifted from poverty just by selling art, made by themselves and not sponsored by a big company. They are able to sell their work and the money they get can help pay off debts and medical bills,” said Soneja, during the panel session on artists’ perception of NFTs.
About 1,000 participants registered for the two-hour workshop. It was an interesting event. For participants new to blockchain and NFT, it was an informative session where speakers and artists explained the surge in the NFT market. They learnt about NFTs which are not limited to art but any creative effort including music and collectibles from the original boxing gloves of world box champions to the first tweets of celebrities. Participants also heard about the barriers to NFT entry and the availability of marketplaces and the certifications necessary for a thriving NFT ecosystem.
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