The Art Angle Podcast: What does the future of NFTs look like now?
Welcome to Art Angle, an Artnet News podcast that delves into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us each week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market and more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators and other top experts in the field.
It may be the dog days of summer IRL, but over in the metaverse we’re firmly in the depths of crypto winter.
When NFT NYC, the world’s largest NFT conference, went down in Times Square last month, Bitcoin and Ether were down more than 70 percent from their peaks in November. That put a damper on the proceedings, and it has had a knock-on effect on the once-ballooning market for digital collectibles. In the first half of 2021, Christie’s sold $93 million worth of NFTs; this year they have sold just $4.8 million.
Meanwhile, NFT players and platforms are dogged by allegations of insider trading and market manipulation, and many in the art world are reassessing their relationship with the sector.
To give us a micro-history of this rapidly changing market, and a summary of how the crypto crash has transformed the NFT space, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Zachary Small, an Artnet News contributor and friend of Art Angle. Small is also the author of the forthcoming book Token Supremacy: How NFTs (and some money laundering) turned decentralized finance into an art form. Here is the conversation.
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