“The rock stars of the future are NFT and the metaverse”, he defined Carlos Bacettipartner of The Black Minds, who together with his partner Ramiro Agullajust launched the tokens of the Politically Incorrect Llama Club. NFTs are a worldwide boom within the crypto industry, which in Argentina alone has just had half a dozen major launches in the last month. But what are NFTs? “Like a digital certificate of ownership, almost like a fingerprint. This is how we can look at them and now they help us identify digital art”, explains cybersecurity expert Arez Lieberman.
The NFT they are pieces of digital art created by artists on a blockchain, representing a rare and unique digital item. Unlike cryptocurrencies, which are all the same, NFTs are all unique. And they have revolutionized artistic financing and ordered communities around an artist or work. Since the American Beeple sold for $69 million a digital collage in NFT (acronym for “non-fungible token”), in March 2021, a little over a year has passed. But the universe of art embraced this technology. Lionel Messi launched his own art collection on NFT. Also the British Museum.
The great wave of Hokusai, the Colombian singer Shakira, the heirs of Picasso, the MoMA, and even a tondo by Michelangelo signed up for the experience. And the associated revolution of merging art with cryptocurrencies hits the foundations of the metaversethe virtual universe that drives Mark Zuckerberg from Meta and many other genius techies.
In Argentina, the last month has brought a flurry of NFT projects. the marketplace enigma.art became associated with Quilmes Rock, offering tokens to fans (they included benefits in gastronomy, merchandising and an aftermovie) and making way for a series of direct actions with a handful of bands.
“We are very excited about the progress we are having in Argentina with a festival that is a reference in all of Ibero-America. In just four months we have already presented unpublished collections of artists like Nicki Nicole, Babasónicos, Duki, Soda Stereo or Bizarrap”, celebrated Matías Loizaga, CEO of Enigma.art (founded by the brothers Facundo and Manuel Migoya, sons of the owner of Globant, together with the producers Popart, Lauría and Pepo Ferradas). which also includes works by Marcos López, Nicola Costantino and Marta Minujin.
the startup Quable also landed in the local market with a link to rock, arts and fashion. She presents herself as an “enabler who helps digital and crypto natives to project and extend their personality through the objects they choose and love.”
“The objects we collect speak for us, they tell a story about who we are and our culture. We believe that in the near future, all things that project our identity will have a digital representation as an NFT stored in a crypto wallet,” explains Federico GarciaCEO and co-founder of Qurable together with Javier Arguello, Rodolfo Finochietti and Sergio Borromei (they had already worked together on Lagash, a software acquired by Mercadolibre).
“We have three verticals. In the fashion world we see a great capacity to be able to test the product and connect it with digital. We did this with María Cher. The second is a benefits club so that each holder of this community is part of exclusive events. And the third step is that they can wear those garments within the metaverse”, adds García.
Carnival, meanwhile, is the project of Diego Gutiérrez Zaldivar and Connie Asaldi. NFT marketplace on the Bitcoin network (and not on Ethereum like the others). And Aura, created by a group of under-30s, offers “virtual exhibits.” “We are dedicated to investigate and cureto give it a twist and make it not a bazaar”, explains Juan Scheinsohn, one of its co-creators.
And since last May 9, the NFTs of avocado. “Our platform allows everyone to be free to publish what they want, set a sale price and share it with the world,” he defined. Augustine Trajtenberg, CEO of the marketplace that will develop its own wallet so that users can store, exchange and stake their AVO tokens. “It seeks to give real use and benefits to those who have that NFT, including invitations to exclusive parties or discounts,” Trajtenberg completed.
It is a new way to develop new expressive forms, and like everything new is to be discovered. I am a restless person and all the time I investigate new ways to create and express myself. NFTs are one of them,” says artist Nicola Costantino.
“I must confess that I do not fully understand these rapid changes in virtual money, bitcoins, NFTs, blockchains, Ethereum and metaverses. However, I accepted the challenge encouraged by my team of collaborators with whom I have been working for a long time, to create the Lópezverse”, wrote the photographer from Santa Fe. Mark Lopez which was uploaded to Enigma. But NFTs are not elusive to the visual arts. Designers like Mary Cher they make their digital collectibles associated with exclusive benefits (along with Qurable).
And even advertisers like Ramiro Agulla and Carlos Bacetti they have their NFT together with the businessman Patricio Fucks (Fën Hoteles): they launched the Politically Incorrect Llama Club with tokens from US$ 300. “La llama que llama”, the spot they devised for Telecom in the ’90s is revived as their first project from The Black Minds, the company in which the three are partners and which will initially issue 10,100 personalized units.
“The llama for us is a fetish and, in this case, it will be a voice that challenges, that cancels the culture of cancellation”, explains Agulla. “Political correctness reached a suffocating extreme. 40% of the boys today care more about saying the right thing than about freedom of expression,” adds Bacetti. Precisely, they want La Llama to drive that debate on taboo topics with intellectual agility.
“The first product The Black Minds is this, but there are offers to work on other non-proprietary projects that we are analyzing. We want to be the great company that creates NTFs in Latin America,” says Bacetti.
The NFT market got off to a rocky start this year. Total NFT transaction activity jumped from $3.9 billion to $964 million according to a May report from Chainalysis. Modesta Masoit, CFO of the DappRadar platform, explained to Fortune that NFT trading is mostly confined to “first line” tokens, like CryptoPunks. “We expected this and it is a normal development in such technology,” she added.
“Markets all ended in the red, cryptocurrencies went to shit. But the only thing that held up were the NFTs. The monkeys (Bored Ape Yacht Club), the CryptoPunks, the motherfuckers (Mfers). The best. And if the Llamas had been there too”, closes Ramiro Agulla.
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