2020 was a banner year for the nascent and blossoming cryptoart scene, which is so dubbed because its participants create artworks as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), selling or auctioning the pieces on blockchains like Ethereum in exchange for cryptocurrencies like ETH.
As the cryptoeconomy turned increasingly bullish this year, interest accordingly surged around NFTs and cryptoart, too. This led to pioneers in this novel creative arena achieving new heights of acclaim and success, and lots of new artists and collectors arriving to check out the ecosystem for themselves.
The results of this cryptoart wave so far have been impressive. On popular Ethereum art platform SuperRare alone, artists and collectors have respectively earned $4.5 million and $1 million to date, for example.
As you can imagine, then, much of this activity has come this year as interest has picked up. Yet for all this activity, there’s still plenty of room for growth when it comes to cryptoart analytics.
There are already great providers in this sector, like OpenSea and NonFungible.com. But there’s been growing demand for projects that offer deeper data insights into cryptoart in particular, so the good news is two such efforts entered the limelight this week: cryptoart.io and NFTArtPulse.
Richard Chen’s cryptoart.io
Richard Chen is a partner at renowned crypto investment fund 1confirmation, which counts among its backers major investors like Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel.
In recent weeks, Chen has been working on cryptoart.io as a labor of love side project tracking cryptoart data on the biggest cryptoart platforms, including SuperRare, MakersPlace, Nifty Gateway, and more.
The free and newly released website is useful because it offers insights into +1,000 cryptoartists, the most expensive NFT art pieces, and Ethereum’s wider art market in general.
In a thread on the new website’s release, 1confirmation general partner Nick Tomaino highlighted some noteworthy developments that can now be readily gleaned through cryptoart.io, like how more than 500 cryptoartists have sold +$4,000 worth of NFTs and how Pak is the first cryptoartist to have a body of NFTs worth valued at over $1 million.
Also exciting: Pak recently became the first artist to surpass a $1M market cap for total cryptoart issued (based on current ETH price) pic.twitter.com/6r1mwfHdLB
— Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) December 7, 2020
It’ll be interesting to see how these stats continue to pan out in the months and years ahead, and a resource like cryptoart.io will make doing so much easier. The ecosystem and its infrastructure is thus growing and may have much more room to grow, Tomaino added:
“Not unreasonable to think that [Pak’s] & [Hackatao’s] success may help catapult the whole cryptoart industry much like BTC and ETH’s success have helped catapult the whole cryptocurrency industry.”
NFTArtPulse Also Arrives to Help
For cryptoart enthusiasts looking to go deeper in understanding the ecosystem’s happenings, they enjoyed a double dose of support this week as the cryptoart.io release was shortly followed up with the unveil of NFTArtPulse.
Announced by NFT trader and expert Matty DCL Blogger, the new platform functions as an “NFT art data feed site for collectors, artists and beyond.”
WOOO
Happy to FINALLY announce https://t.co/zrUy7RNRBg!#NFT Art Data Feed Site for collectors, artists and beyond.
Check sales in real time, currently covers @SuperRare, @makersplaceco, @KnownOrigin_io using @opensea
Follow -> @NFTArtPulse
What's next? A LOT
1/ Thread ???? pic.twitter.com/Be61ey2z25
— MattyVerse (@DCLBlogger) December 8, 2020
The website lets users quickly check the latest cryptoart sales in real-time, and it offers a variety of search functionalities, e.g. filtering by artists’ sales and sales growth.
Going forward, the platform’s team plans to expand beyond mere data services into galleries, interviews, an Artist Wiki hub, and more.
Looking Ahead
cryptoart.io and NFTArtPulse will undoubtedly grow from here, adding support for further NFT platforms for better data and so on.
Moreover, these two oncomers certainly won’t be the last entrants to the cryptoart data analytics sector. The field is still so early and wide open that we’ll likely see more than a few more plays from here. Yet it’s all rising synergistically toward the same point: a more successful and robust cryptoart scene.