Art and Blockchain [Part3]: Digital Art Chain and OpenSea
Dear Crypto-Art fans,
in part three of my ongoing series about the conjunction of art and blockchain technology, I want to talk about a dApp called Digital Art Chain, which enables you to publish your digital art (and music) as an ERC721 token on the Ethereum blockchain.
If you haven't already, you might also want to check part 1 and part2 of the series, where I talked about Bitmark and Ascribe.io. Although Ascribe was my previous favorite, they recently disabled new user sign-ups. Therefore I had to look for different ways of issuing and tokenizing my digital art.
Digital Art Chain
I discovered this new service while browsing at OpenSea, which describes itself as "The world’s largest digital marketplace for crypto collectibles." They suppose to already have more than 1.2 million digital assets like CryptoKitties, CryptoPunks or Eth.Town heroes listed on their site. You can also find various digital-art from crypto-art related trading platforms like KnownOrigin and SuperRare over there.
If you visit the Digital Art Chain website, you'll get this short explanation of their service:
IPFS
You may have heard these terms before, but in case you're still wondering, I will give you a short explanation.
IPFS is a distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, this is similar to the original aims of the Web, but IPFS is actually more similar to a single bittorrent swarm exchanging git objects. [...] IPFS could become a new major subsystem of the internet. If built right, it could complement or replace HTTP. It could complement or replace even more. It sounds crazy. It is crazy.
Steem based video and audio streaming services like DTube and DSound already make use of IPFS to store and distribute their user's content.
ERC721 or NFTs (Non-Fungible-Tokens)
The ERC-721 protocol is a standard for Non-Fungible Tokens on Ethereum. In contrary to the well known ERC20 standard, NFTs represent something unique, can't be devided and are thus not interchangeable. This way they can help proving authenticity and ownership in digital art.
While most tokens are fungible (every token is the same as every other token), ERC-721 tokens are all unique. Think of them like rare, one-of-a-kind collectables.
Digital Artwork called "Non-Fungible" by HEX0x6C, that I've recently won in a twitter giveaway.
ERC20 vs. ERC721
Here is a very good explanation, I found at The Bitcoin Pub forum:
Many tokens - and indeed cryptocurrencies - are fungible. If you send someone a Bitcoin, and get one back, you wouldn’t notice any difference.
A lot of the time, fungible tokens are built using a standard called ERC-20. For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine each of these tokens is a $10 bill. If you sent a token to someone, and got another one back a week later, they would be identical.
This all changes with non-fungible tokens, many of which are ERC-721 compliant.
These can be compared to baseball cards, as each has unique information and varying levels of rarity. If you were to accidentally send one of these tokens to someone, and get a different ERC-721 token back, you might be very upset.
There’s one more crucial difference you need to bear in mind.
Fungible tokens are divisible – meaning you can send a fraction of one ERC-20 token. (Like cash, where you can pay with a $10 bill and get change.) On the other hand, non-fungible ERC-721 tokens cannot be divided and must be bought or sold whole. (Like baseball cards, where no one in their right mind would want to buy half.)
ETH and Metamask
Now that you've got an idea of the concept of NFTs, you might want to tokenize a digital-artwork or soundfile by yourself. The only thing you'll need is the well known metamask browser extension (available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and the new Brave browser) and some ETH to cover the gas fees. The Digital Art Chain service itself is free of charge.
If you click on puplish you will be taken to an input form, where you'll be able to upload a JPEG, PNG or GIF file.
After the file has successfully uploaded to IFPS, the metamask extension will pop-up and ask you to pay a small Gas fee for the token creation. I would suggest to check the Gas-price at ETH Gas Station and eventually adjust it in metamask, if you don't want to risk waiting a long time for your transaction being confirmed.
When you've sent the transaction, you will receive a message containing the transaction hash, which you can monitor using an ETH block-explorer like Etherscan.
After the transaction is confirmed by the Ethereum network, you then will be able to see your digital-artwork under the MyDigitalArt tab.
Buy Goods
You could even order some T-Shirts, mugs, hoodies or iPhone cases with your printed digital-art right from the website. They integrated a service called CryptoGoods for that usecase.
OpenSea
If you plan to sell your digital artwork, you can also find it at your OpenSea account, from where you can set up an auction or provide an instant buy price in Ether. OpenSea only takes a small 1.25 % service fee for every successful trade.
The only downside, that I'd like to see improved in the future, is the missing possibility to edit the description of the token.
You can find my artwork here and although I didn't set a price for this artwork, you can always make me an offer.
TL;DR
Digital Art Chain is a fantastic free service, that enables you to convert your digital art and sound files in Non-Fungible (ERC721) Ethereum tokens and easily sell them at OpenSea.
The platform even provides some basic tools to create your own digital art, like a simple drawing interface and an avatar generator, which you could instantly tokenize after creation.
I was especially blown away by the possibility to let every Non-Fungible token talk, but that's probably stuff for my next post about art and blockchain.
Art and Blockchain
Please also check my previous posts about art and blockchain:
Part 1 - VRintelligentART and Bitmark
Part2 - XCOPY Art and Ascribe (which has been disabled new user sign-ups)
Thanks a lot for reading!
![follow_shortcut.gif](https://steemitimages.com/DQmaA8bxxAvMmg1iGSJibQ6NAjHdgmm72KbsHUEPurrqwgw/follow_shortcut.gif)
Well this looks interesting. That is too bad about ascribe.io..it says theyre going opensource so maybe something will pop up from that.
Socond that. I was also a huge fan of ascribe.io and definitley would like to see it continued.
On the other hand ERC721 tokens seem to become sort of a standard for issuing and trading digital art these days.
This is all so good and interesting. As an artist I am always intrigued and trying to find a way to tie my work to the blockchain. I've recently put some things up by inviation at R.A.R.E.io and they use the metamask. I'm still new to all of it, so I need to book mark this and check out all your links.
Thanks for your comment! Tying your work to blockchains is definitely the way to go ;-)
I've no personal experiences with R.A.R.E., although I'm following them on twitter for a while. The biggest advantage of platforms like this is, that they handpick and actively curate their artists, while DigitalArtChain lets everybody tokenize their digital files. Curated platforms usually keep a share of the selling price in return for their work.
Most of those platforms also make use of the Ethereum network, which everybody can easily interact with through the Metamask extension. Right now it seems, that Ethereum based ERC721 tokens have become kind of a standard in the digital art market.
I'm wishing you a lot of success in selling your art and I would be interested in reading about your personal experiences with R.A.R.E. in the future.
This is great, @shortcut!
I'm not a big fan of digital art, neither to produce it, nor to consume it.
I love the error, chaos, expression and spontaneity that occurs with traditional media. And I love the smell of paint and the different brightness in the textures according to the lighting when you are in front a piece of art.
But..
Let's try!!!
May be this is the perfect channel for me.
Life has a funny way to help you out. As Alanis would say.
Thanks for your feedback! I was also very sceptical about digital-art at first, but the more I dive into this space, the more possibilities open up. You could even tokenize a photo of your analog art and use the token as a proof of ownership (like a certificate). I'm pretty sure, that blockchain has the potential to revolutionize the art-market and it feels amazing, to take part in that journey.
the art-market.. the whole art and the everything market!!
And yes, it seems an adventure that I want to be part of.
I found this quite interesting. I'm still grasping the full implications, but certainly appreciate art in all it's forms. I think the future will hold more potential for unique expressions of both art and in this case non-fungible tokens. Thanks for helping me expand my understanding of the crypto world.
You‘re welcome! Glad, that the article is useful for you.
Nice post @shortcut!
Thanks a lot! Glad, that you like it :-)
This is a map of some city :)
Yeah, it’s for discovering the shortcuts ;-)
i belive that is because you need the direction in your dreams ;)
The art is looking like a community with some houses buildings and pavements ,kidding 😊😊😊
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Thanks for your feedback regarding my artwork, I can see, what you mean :-) There are a lot of valuable infos in my post, you might also be interested in, though.
Sure dear
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@shortcut It's seems to be very much interesting . Loved a lot while reading
Thanks for your appreciation!
@shortcut
This art is nice especially this art chain is looks like pattern...
Thanks for your feedback. Hopefully you will also find some interesting infos inside my post.