At some point in our lives, we have encountered a painting that impresses us or represents our feelings.
Certainly, since ancient times, art has been consolidated as a standard and an expression of human sensibility.
However, with the advent of technology, the art transcended completely.
Vinyls, watercolors, pencils, charcoals, different types of papers, are transformed into only two tools: a tablet and a pencil. Of course, this does not change the magnificent and unique result that each artist gives us.
The marketing process has also been transformed and today the Internet facilitates many platforms to buy and sell digital works.
In addition, with the advent of NFTs, the art has been completely revolutionized.
What is an NFT?
NFTs allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique digital items and track who owns them using the blockchain.
If you want to know more about them, you can check our article about NFT (non fungible tokens). If you already know about them, let’s continue, because I want to introduce you to one of the best NFT trading platforms called Foundation.
So grab your painting supplies, because I’ll show you some very basic, but useful, brush strokes to understand how this platform works and what its value is for today’s art.
What is Foundation?
Foundation is a decentralized platform that facilitates live auctions of non fungible token (NFT), specifically, artists’ digital artwork.
To do so, it uses Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts.
Additionally, it is an application that allows you to buy, sell and exchange limited edition products that serves as a bridge between cryptocurrency and artists, creators and collectors.
It is simple and easy to use, as you can become a buyer or collector immediately after registering. In this way, it optimizes the user experience for bidding on digital art.
Several artists have made use of it and have had good results. An example of this is Beeple, a 3D artist who has made headlines by selling a collection of his works for $69 million dollars!
How does Foundation work?
To understand how it works, let’s start with four important actors:
1- The digital artist
To sell art through Foundation, you must be invited by a Foundation user who knows you or you must be voted by the community.
Once you have received the invitation or have been chosen, you will need to set up an ETH wallet to create your profile and mint an NFT.
The NFT minting process refers to the fact that the piece you offer for sale will be represented by a token. It is useful to symbolize the possession of the copyright and, therefore, its authenticity.
In order for this process to be completed, you must pay a gas fee, which is the cost of interacting with the Ethereum blockchain.
Next, you will have your own profile page, where all your works and the bidding history of each piece are displayed. It also shows a short biography and a link to your social networks.
With all this taken care of, you can start pricing your artwork in ETH to develop an auction.
Each auction is activated as soon as someone starts bidding on it. If no one bids on it, the initial listing price may change.
Please note that of the 100% of the final sale price, 85% is for you and 15% is for Foundation and the gas rates.
Now, every time the user who acquired it resells the work, the creator earns a 10% fee. In other words, they earn money in a secondary market for exchanging their work.
2- Collectors
At Foundation, anyone can create a profile to start collecting NFT. The only requirements are to have a 3.0 wallet (example metamask) and ETH, the token used to pay for all Ethereum transactions.
If you are interested in something special, such as Nyan Cat, as a collector you can use the Etherscan scanner that will search for the artist’s piece found on the blockchain.
After your search, the first thing you will find is a reserve price from the creator. Once the first bid is placed, a 24-hour auction countdown begins.
If a bid is placed in the last 15 minutes of the 24-hour period, the auction is extended for another 15 minutes.
It is important to mention that the auction process is quite transparent, as it makes it easy to see when the piece was created, who created it and allows you to view a complete history of who has owned it.
Finally, if you decide to bid and win the auction, you can claim the NFT.
From there, the artwork is transferred to your Wallet and appears in your collector profile. The uses you can give to the product you purchased are:
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- Exhibit it in your virtual gallery.
- Share it on social networks.
- Sell it on a secondary market such as Open Sea.
3- The community
At Foundation, there are many ways to get involved and one of them is to be part of the community. The community is made up of anyone who wants to join Foundation’s digital culture through Discord, Instagram or Twitter.
Periodically, the community provides a series of targeted initiatives and events where users can connect, participate and create new groups around their interests. They can also decide which new artists can sell their work.
4- Developers
As well as providing spaces for artists, large and small collectors and the community, they also open an opportunity for developers.
Through its API (Application Programming Interface), Foundation offers developers the opportunity to create new functions based on others that are not to their liking. To do so, they can modify different aspects such as profiles, reservation prices, end time, among others.
These functions are called “FND Subgraph”. It consists of a user interface that developers create using Foundation data. There are different “subgraphs” for Foundation data on the Ethereum mainnet and the Goerli testnet.
These Subgraphs are built using The Graph, which uses the GraphQL data query language. One of the subgraphs used by Foundation, is the Mainnet subgraph, which contains all the information that can be found in Foundation.
Hey, Dalí of 2021! Here we conclude our painting.
What did you think? Honestly, we cover quite modern forms, but we hope it was useful to understand a bit more about how Foundation and digital art works with NFT.
But…oh…wait, you were left wanting more?
Don’t worry! At Bitnovo, we are working hard to get you the best information in less time than it would take Michelangelo to recreate his painting of the last supper.
We also have our own website where you can buy Ethereum, the cryptocurrency necessary for you to buy NFT at Foundation.
See you next time!
