Billionaire entrepreneur, Shark Tank investor and Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is once again innovating in the digital space, launching a new kind of online art gallery for creators in Dallas and beyond.
He’s created a platform to present non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, the digital assets that have been grabbing headlines since an artist known as Beeple sold one for $69 million at the auction house Christie’s in March.
The tokens are an emerging form of blockchain technology, which, unlike fungible cryptocurrencies, can be directly tied to properties both online and in the real world. Once an item has been “tokenized,” the NFT acts as a certificate of authenticity that is encrypted and cannot be replicated. They’re sort of like deeds or a signed painting, only more tamper-resistant. NFTs convey ownership and scarcity, and can represent almost anything, including assets that aren’t digital, like real estate.
Cuban’s latest venture will serve as an online display case for NFTs representing digital goods, such as GIFs, JPEGs, MP3s, MP4s and more. His aim is to give creators and collectors a dedicated, user-friendly place to show off their artwork, audio and videos.
It’s a lazier approach for those with an interest in collectibles, and that’s the point. Hence, Lazy.com.
“Lazy.com is meant to be a personal gallery of your NFTs,” Cuban told The News. “We give you a very simple link like lazy.com/mcuban so that you can put it in your social media profile, or send the link in an email to friends or post it anywhere.”
It comes as the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated e-commerce and changed the way we consume art altogether. Conceptually, an NFT showroom is easy to understand.
What an NFT is, or rather, what an NFT can represent, is harder to grasp.
To some, an NFT representing a digitized artwork might only be as valuable as the owner’s capacity to display it. For a recently created artwork, the purchase of its NFT may grant the new owner some usage rights; that’s up to the creator. However, the purchase of an NFT for a widely circulated, copied and archived digital asset is harder to figure, and may ultimately amount to a gratuitous flex.
After all, what’s the point of owning a piece of pop culture if there’s nowhere to show it off?
That’s where Lazy.com would come in. Cuban’s new website looks to capitalize on red-hot NFT markets that are still largely nascent yet have already proved highly profitable for some.
Currently, the hottest market in the NFT realm is NBA Top Shot, a place where people exchange digitized professional basketball moments like actual sports memorabilia. Think of these moments as digital trading cards. Millions of dollars in cryptocurrency are exchanged on the website every 24 hours. An NFT representing a video clip of LeBron James dunking recently sold for $200,000.
A large percentage of NFT transactions made thus far have been for works depicting kittens. That’s surprising, but also totally not surprising — the internet is obsessed with cats.
CryptoKitties is an NFT marketplace where users buy, sell and exchange digital cartoon representations of cats. Each cat is valued differently and comes with a unique set of “Cattributes,” and the same goes for each of their offspring. Yes, digital cats can reproduce, apparently.
Remember Nyan Cat? The 10-year-old meme of a cartoon kitten dressed as a Pop-Tart dancing on a rainbow across time and space? The creator of that popular GIF, Plano resident Chris Torres, designed a one-of-a-kind version of the meme that was auctioned online in February. Its NFT sold for nearly $600,000.
Musicians such as Grimes and DJ 3LAU have also sold collections in NFT form for millions.
just setting up my twttr
— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
And then there’s Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who in March sold a tokenized version of the first tweet ever for $2.9 million.
The Store of Value Generation is Kicking Your Ass and You Don't Even Know it Yet !https://t.co/7YQ7ueXFLr
— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) January 31, 2021
An NFT representing a tweet from Cuban himself also sold online this year for $952. The tweet links to Cuban’s blog, where he wrote at length on his belief that blockchain-driven assets, like NFTs, “have now legitimately become stores of value.”
NFT technology has been lauded for its potential to revolutionize buying and selling. NFTs not only expedite online transactions, but also add a layer of security and reduce the risk of fraud.
The technology has raised some red flags as well, one of which concerns copyright law. There’s currently nothing to stop someone from retroactively making an NFT for an asset they didn’t actually create. Online anonymity could make copyright enforcement for NFTs challenging.
Storage and sustainability appear to be the technology’s other major obstacles. The networks of computers that run blockchain infrastructure consume lots of power. A single NFT purchase is “roughly equivalent to an EU resident’s electric power consumption for 4 days,” The New Yorker recently wrote, citing work by a London artist and engineer who did the math.
In the fine art world, NFTs have irked some gallerists and curators who see them as more of a money-grab than as legitimate artworks able to meet lofty aesthetic standards.
But the numerous questions raised by NFTs haven’t made the technology less popular so far, and Cuban’s website is quickly generating attention.
“We have more than 110k users in less than 2 weeks, and we hope to grow it a lot,” Cuban said via email.
The website is live but still in beta testing.
“We will be adding a ton of features,” Cuban added. “This is just the beginning.”
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