ision screens surrounded by a traditional frame, like a painting in a museum. NFTs are becoming more mainstream and are being displayed in living rooms.
Benoît Couty: Your NFTs are held at a cryptographic address, which is an electronic address that only you can access. But anyone can see your cryptographic address and can see all the NFTs you own. It’s like a traditional museum: people can see the works, take pictures of them and then print them out and display them at home, but they don’t own the originals. We know where the Mona Lisa is, anyone can look at it in the Louvre or on their computer, but it does not belong to us, and we cannot sell it.
With NFTs, everything is public, and completely transparent. There is risk, but it does not come from the blockchain technology. The latter has been in existence for 10 years and was created by Bitcoin. Since then, it has developed enormously, particularly with Ethereum which made the creation and transfer of NFTs more fluid. The blockchain and NFTs started becoming popular in 2015. The technology has been proven to be robust and tamper-proof. However, when you own cryptocurrency, you have an access code which is usually 12 or 24 words. If you lose this access code, or if someone manages to obtain it, they will be able to access your digital asset portfolio. 99% of security breaches are due to consumers not protecting their passwords sufficiently.
Benoît Couty: Thanks to NFTs, artists can sell their works of art without the need for gallery owners. They can sell them very easily because there are no transport or logistics issues: you buy and sell with a click. So, all the usual activity that accompanies the sale of works of art is no longer necessary, it has become superfluous… All the traditional players must now prove their added value or reinvent themselves. The numbers of NFT artists are rapidly growing, two of the most well-known in France are Pascal Boyard (better known as PBOY) and lulu xXX. There are people who create digital art every day, but it’s like traditional art: not everyone who buys some tubes of paint and applies them to a canvas is a grand master. With NFTs, it’s the same, it’s very much a case of supply and demand. Furthermore, when NFT artists sell their digital work, they receive the initial sale price. After that, every time their work is sold, they can be sure of receiving 10% or 15% in royalties. This changes everything for artists: they now have the possibility of generating revenue streams.