Volker Mayr had heard of Bitcoin. Now and then, on the news on NTV; that the price of digital gold has crashed or reached new heights. That never interested the 80-year-old painter. Cryptocurrencies? NFTs? The Metaverse? These are terms from a strange, very strange world. Suddenly he is drawn into her, against his will.
At the beginning of April 2022, his life’s work will be for sale on a crypto exchange on the Internet. Volker Mayr has a profile on the online gallery singular type, over 10,000 artists and photographers are registered there, their pictures stored as JPEGs. Someone is offering the works of Volker Mayr as non-fungible tokens (NFT) on an NFT platform called Mintable without the knowledge of the artist. He wants to find out who is behind it. A week ago he informed the editors of BTC-ECHO about the incident, which is doing its own research. An odyssey into a Kafkaesque system begins.
Many already see NFTs as one of the biggest media revolutions of the 21st century. Any digital object can be transferred to the blockchain and sold. Artists and musicians open up new sales opportunities for their digital property. Last year the market exploded by 25,000 percent to $17 billion, according to NonFungible.com. Even traditional art houses like Christies got involved.
At the same time, media reports about artists whose works have been stolen from the internet and offered illegally on NFT platforms have been increasing for months. The full extent of this new form of art theft is difficult to quantify, exact figures are not available. But only an online gallery, DeviantArtfound according to The Guardians 80,000+ stolen works from its clients on NFT marketplaces.
“It’s much easier to create fakes in the blockchain space than in the traditional art world,” Tina Rivers Ryan, a New York-based curator and digital art expert, told the British newsmagazine. In fact, it’s so easy that bots now appear to be combing through online galleries and doing the theft fully automatically.
Theft of an NFT is difficult to combat
Fighting against this is all the more difficult for the artists affected, and it costs energy, time and money. Complaints online and in the media are getting louder. Many victims feel left alone with the problem. There is great uncertainty: Who do you turn to in such a case? How to sue anonymous crypto wallet owner? In which jurisdiction? “As a lone fighter you can do little,” says Volker Mayr on the phone to BTC-ECHO.
Before retiring in 2002 he was a journalist, he once built this Free Radio Berlin with on. Today he lives in Grunewald in Berlin. During the day he takes care of his wife, in the evening he paints. Beautiful, expressive images. Even his grandfather was a painter, says Mayr. He has been wielding a brush since childhood, has been organizing exhibitions, selling works and winning prizes since the 1970s.
90 percent of his works circulate as NFT
First he received dubious emails from an NFT exchange in Japan, which are also available to BTC-ECHO. It states that his works were sold as NFTs for tens of thousands of US dollars. They are willing to transfer the money to him, minus a commission, but they want data from him, proof of authorship. Mayr hesitates at first, then finally cooperates, he never sees any money. The same thing happened to other German-speaking painters on the platform, they tell him when asked. A scam, he thinks today. It’s just the beginning.
If his works are already being sold in the blockchain space, he at least wants to earn some money. So Mayr signs up with Mintable, an NFT marketplace with a reputable reputation. But 90 percent of his works already exist as NFTs. Some are on sale at the time, one for the equivalent of $1 million in ether. Mayr creates his own account, spends the next few evenings trying to understand what’s happening there, clicking through the transaction histories of his pictures etherscan: “I was like a blind man on the piano.”
BTC-ECHO contacted Mintable support a week ago discord. An admin there explains that such cases are taken very seriously. Mayr should contact the team via his Twitter account and provide proof of ownership. He does that and doesn’t get an answer. To this day, he does not know whether Mintable has become active. The admins in support on Discord have not yet responded to another request from BTC-ECHO yesterday afternoon, April 11, 2022.
He stays on the damage
Some of the stolen NFTs have since disappeared, Mayr said. He could complain about others directly via the portal, often for a fee. And the process doesn’t always work.
Sometimes a file cannot be created or the image is not displayed. A third of his works are now in his possession as NFTs, but they are worthless. No offers came in. Volker Mayr bears the costs. He spent a total of over a thousand dollars.
He hopes that at some point artists will join forces in class action lawsuits and that consumer protection will take action. Until then, he protects himself – with an absurd measure: Before Volker Mayr uploads the next picture to his artist profile, he always creates an NFT of it from now on. This is the only way he will feel safe from further thefts.
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