Anyone interested in street art as an investment form will soon be able to secure motifs from well-known street artists as NFT via METAWALLS.
Non-fungible tokens have penetrated all areas. From music, art and literature to real estate bonds and vintage cars to tweets: No investment or certificate that cannot be displayed in NFT form and immortalized on the blockchain. With a few exceptions, however, the NFT goblet seems to bypass street art. The fact that guerrilla art has remained largely untapped is in the nature of things: the artists, who often operate on the border of legality: inside often remain anonymous and, in contrast to the canvas, the wall of the house is exposed to the devastation and tides in urban areas. The fact that cities serve as free gallery areas and passers-by as involuntary visitors does not have to be an exclusion criterion, like the platform METAWALLS Berlin shows, which starts the first NFT pre-sale for street art on Sunday 3rd October.
A piece of street art as NFT
To kick off, METAWALLS caught none other than the Berlin artist, musician and free spirit Jim Avignon. If you walk through the capital with your eyes open, sooner or later you will inevitably stumble past a “Jim Avignon”, either in galleries or on the longest-preserved piece of the Berlin Wall – the East Side Gallery. One of his most famous works can be found there, the large-scale “Doing it cool for the east side”, which the artist himself “crossed” as a protest action in 1991, i.e. painted over it with a lettering to draw attention to the commercialization of the art of the Berlin Wall . Since then, “Moneymachine” has been clearly visible above the mural and is also the title of the NFT collection, whose first batch of 125 tokens will go on sale on Sunday at a special price.
Collective tokens
It is not only METAWALLS ‘approach of transferring street art in token form that is innovative. The platform also implements the idea of collective participation, which is closely associated with the street art spirit, via the multi-token standard ERC-1155. The “CO-NFT” shown on the polygon allow a plant to be divided into any number of tokens. Even narrowly filled wallets can thus afford shares and set a foot – albeit a small one – in the art market. CO-NFT are an instrument to democratize access to street art and art and also to enable collective forms of investment, as METAWALLS co-founder Ania Pilipenko explains: “Our CO-NFT technology enables artists to participate directly, independently and fairly in the entire value chain of their art, where they are otherwise far too often left out, especially with street art ”.
In addition, the creatives also retain control over their works, something street artists, who usually make their pictures available to the general public, have to get used to. “The final decision as to whether the last shares of a work are also sold always rests with the artist himself. In addition, the copyrights remain protected because the artist (s) is automatically taken into account in the resale. The appropriation of new formats by NFT means a paradigm shift for the art world, Co-NFT go one step further and expand the concept of the art trade ”, says Ania Pilipenko.
The token sale is just the beginning. On November 9th, METAWALLS will move the virtual gallery “The Embassy” into the blockchain-based VR environment Decentraland. In the Voltaire district, not far from the digital exhibition areas of the KÖNIG GALERIE and Sotheby’s, the METAWALLS gallery will be in a prime location in the future. If the trip to Berlin is too far for you, you can soon experience the works in the virtual world.