A year is a long time in NFT land

I wrote more than a year ago about some investigations into NFTs. Initially drawn in by the possibility of online publishing as an environmentally cleaner equivalent to physical exhibitions. My first post was about finding and rejecting OpenSea and its use of  PoW Ethereum-based blockchain.

A second post in March 2021 detailed an investigationof cleanNFT platform hicetnunc.xyz and the environmental and practical issues around art-based NFTs.

Lets say its been eye-opening and a rollercoaster ride since then.

hicetnunc was underground and then suddenly and temporarily had more activity than the popular OpenSea. Just as suddenly, on November 12th it was turned off.
Four months went by while a successor (or fork) was brought to life in the name of teia.art
As teia was about to launch, suddenly hicetnunc was back online. But the landscape had already changed. A tezos based generative platform – fxhash – had drawn some attention and was massively popular, and another – versum.xyz had just come online, formed by ex hicetenunc developers. objkt.com had been going since July 2021, firstly to introduce auctions to the hicetnunc arena and along with the hicetnunc mirrors that popped up hours after it went down, there was a much bigger ecosystem, all co-existing and overlapping to one or other extent.
In March 2022 came an 8bit on-chain artistic platform 8bidou.com (which experienced some growth and scammer issues) and a 3d environment – tz1land.
All of these platforms more or less use a web3 model of decentralising content. In the case of an NFT platform, that means that text content might come from (and go to) a blockchain. Images are stored on a third-party space that guarantees extended availability, such as IPFS. Taking this further, development of the platform might occur globally with contracted or volunteer devs. The platforms sometimes attempt to have decentralised administration, distributing organisation through a DAO.
On the art side of things, Tezos appears to have collected up a unique and experimental range of artists from diverse regions. Part of this diversity is because the get-involved cost is peanuts, even for most poorer artists. Five New Zealand dollars will allow you to mint 10 works or more on many of the platforms, AND start a small collection of the works of others. To participate in Ethereum-based platforms you’re talking hundreds sometimes – and those are transaction fees, before even the cost of the art comes into play.