Posted in: Batman, Comics, DC Comics | Tagged: Batman, dc comics, nft, nftwatch, veve
Veve Collectibles Launch DC Comics Batman NFT Lines With Jim Lee
Earlier today, Bleeding Cool leaked the letter sent to DC Comics freelancers last night regarding the use of NFT non-fungible tokens for selling artwork containing DC Comics characters, after one artist made almost two million dollars from his Wonder Woman art. Basically, it read a) we have our own NFT plans for DC Comics characters and b) so you had better not have yours.
And now we have got to see some of them. Yesterday Veve Collectibles also announced an NFT line of DC Comics Batman Black & White collectable figures, courtesy of DC Direct, only for the app to crash, leaving many disappointed customers trying to get a Jim Lee Nightwing.
There are major concerns with the current NFT marketplace. .To make an NFT, you have to "mint it"- register it on the blockchain, which takes energy and costs money, from $40 to $1000, depending. That registration can then be sold on. Creating and maintaining the ownership and registration of NFT artwork uses somewhere between weeks, months, years, and even decades of a First World user's average citizen's energy consumption, depending on the work. Ethereum, the digital currency used for NFT, uses a protocol to determine their value called "proof of work", through computer "mining". Initially a background process that could run on a laptop, the proof of work gets harder to match the increase in mining which has led to enormous banks of computers being set up in cheap energy territories in air-conditioned shipping containers, all competing with each other. And in total, using more energy than Argentina.
NFT artwork also recreates the worst aspects of the physical art market as standard for the digital art market, regarding them primarily tokens of monetary worth, attracting high roller money laundering and tax evasion, as well as not respecting copyright of the actual originators of the artwork being NFT'd. One reason why firms like DC Comics and Marvel are getting into it now, if only to exploit their own IP… but not everyone is down for it.