Binance’s NFT marketplace has announced it is teaming up with the Saint Petersburg-based State Hermitage Museum to issue tokenized collectibles depicting the works of renowned artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh. On July 27, Binance revealed it is partnering with the museum to create and issue the nonfungible tokens at the end of August. All Binance users will be able to participate in the auction. The blog post attributes the idea to tokenize the artworks to The Hermitage, with the auction slated to launch limited edition NFT copies of Da Vinci’s Madonna Litta, van Gogh’s Lilac Bush, …

For millennia, the world of art has remained unchanged for the most part. The tradition has always revolved around artists selling their work to museums, galleries, or individual collectors. In return, the artist would get a market value for their work which was often kept in private vaults and only displayed to the public ever so often. With the advent of NFTs, many artists are now able to take their work and offer it up for sale as a digital collectible. Through these blockchain-enabled digital assets, the artist cannot only maintain ownership of a piece of the art they produce …

A nonfungible token (NFT) can be both a representation of a physical or digital asset that only exists on the internet — a programmable piece of art. It provides ownership of an underlying asset, like a painting, and it can also represent a digital asset in the form of a software code. Therefore, I like to conceptualize NFTs in a more technical view: “An NFT is a pattern of smart contracts that provides a standardized way of verifying who owns an NFT, and a standardized way of ‘moving’ nonfungible digital assets.” Before discussing the legality of an NFT, it is …

Leading contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s nonfungible token (NFT) drop dubbed “The Currency” has been oversubscribed by more than six times. The NFT drop consists of 10,000 unique colorful dot pattern artworks with a corresponding NFT for each piece. Applications for the NFT drop closed on Thursday, and Heni Group, which hosted the sale, revealed that 32,472 people applied for a total of 67,023 NFTs. That means many applications will either be scaled back or unsuccessful, given there are only 10,000 NFTs available. Many collectors will now have to seek out the NFTs on secondary markets. Applications have closed for @hirst_official's …

A new NFT marketplace and gallery offers a refined twist — delivering style, sophistication and a social element that allows people to bond over their shared love of digital assets. Musée delivers a platform for crypto art creators and collectors with 10,000 plots, and each one is an NFT that reflects full ownership and control of that digital real estate asset. These plots can be purchased and used to mount crypto artwork and collectibles, which can then be purchased by Musée’s visitors. The project’s homepage greets users with an at-a-glance look at all of the plots that are occupied — …

This year’s Taobao Maker Festival — an annual event celebrating Chinese art and entrepreneurship hosted by the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform Taobao — will showcase nonfungible tokens (NFTs) for the first time. This year’s event will see decentralized application platform Near Protocol team up with blockchain gaming firm Web3Games and Chinese artist Huang Heshan to sell NFT-based real estate created by Huang. Heshan’s virtual “Bu Tu Garden” will be available for purchase during the event, with the garden comprising more than 1,000 virtual structures, including ten “luxury single-family villas,” 300 high-end units, and 1,000 “umbrella” parasols. Bu Tu Garden forms part …

Damien Hirst, a contemporary artist known around the world, talked about similarities and differences between artwork and fiat currency as he prepared to drop 10,000 NFTs tied to his physical paintings. Speaking with Cointelegraph’s Andrew Thurman at his London studio in May, Hirst answered questions in a magic 8-ball fashion, by opening up one of the boxes containing hundreds of sheets of his The Currency artwork collection and reading a sentence off the back of the paper. Though the immediate answers were not always on topic — is Satoshi really a cliche? — the artist laughed at the absurdity continued …

Digital asset-focused Swiss Bank, Sygnum, has teamed up with art investment firm Artemundi to offer fractionalized ownership shares in a Pablo Picasso painting for $6,000 each. Shares representing ownership over $3.68 million Picasso painting, “Fillette au béret,” will be tokenized and issued via blockchain technology, allowing a wide variety of investors to gain exposure to the artwork. The nonfungible tokens (NFTs) can be exclusively purchased by sophisticated and institutional investors through Sygnum Bank, with secondary trade set to take place on SygnEx — the bank’s digital asset trading platform. Trades will be settled in Swiss Francs (CHF) using Sygnum’s native …

For luxury brands, usual business and marketing practices work upside down. While other businesses aim to scale, optimize and become accessible — luxury brands are supposed to be a cold and beautiful dream, causing admiration and (rarely fulfilled) desires of ownership. Building a luxury brand takes generations of storytelling, and the skill of maintaining a fragile balance between making profits and remaining exclusive, one-of-a-kind perfection. This paradigm has shifted with the trends of the modern era, in which a successful business should be data-driven and community-driven. Digitalization aims to democratize everything from finance to art, and luxury brands need to …

American Express (Amex) has teamed up with popular neo-soul singer and songwriter SZA to enter the nonfungible token (NFT) market. The duo partnered to drop a set of 14 one-of-one edition NFTs, dubbed “Amex Unstaged x SZA: The Collection,” that depict moments from one of SZA’s recent concerts. Participation in the NFT sale was made available only to Amex users, with the first 10 dropped on Monday, and concert-goer's were given exclusive access. The remaining four were dropped earlier today and were made available to all Amex users. Each NFT was priced at $100 and all were sold out within …

Tokenized Walking Dead Ethereum-based NFT metaverse “The Sandbox” has partnered with Skybound Entertainment to incorporate a Walking Dead game in the virtual world. The Walking Dead is famous thanks to the TV show, however, the story and characters are based on original comics from Skybound Entertainment. The Sandbox is owned by NFT game and property developer Animoca brands, with the firm describing it as “part virtual real-estate, part amusement park.” It already has an impressive list of existing partnerships such as The Smurfs, Care Bears, Atari, Deadmau5 and CryptoKitties. “The team will give users the possibility to get pieces of …

From June 20 1995 until June 23 2021, Hongkongers concerned about growing Chinese influence in the Special Administrative Region had at least one local media outlet in their corner. Apple Daily was known for its pro-democracy stance, when not covering sensationalist tabloid-style news — two editorial innovations that set it apart from almost all other media outlets in Hong Kong at the time of its launch. And although the publication survived a 2020 raid on its offices, when the CEO, COO, Editor in Chief and other executives were arrested by police on June 17 2021 on suspicion of violating Article …