Tag: NFT

A desk with calendars, symbolizing 2021 and its fintech industry developments

The Fintech Year of 2021 – An Industry Recap

Christoph Laurer Leave a comment

Writing a 2021 recap of fintech has been a tough call. No misunderstandings here: A lot has happened in the industry. But we have gotten so used to the future of payments being both digital and mobile (and some would throw a decentralized in there, too). Long familiar talking points continue rotating in the press: 

  • Embedded Finance keeps breaking through.
  • BigTech companies still follow their payment ambitions. 
  • Invisible payments in mobile and online payment remain attractive for customers. 
  • Embracing Open Banking is significant for all financial players. 
  • The promises of Artificial Intelligence await around the corner. 

So what is to write, when we can expect all of this to define the financial industry in the next years? Well, the devil will be in the details: How will those factors play out on the level of specific target groups, use cases or nations? How is the fintech industry holding up as a whole? And what happened in the crypto sphere? 

You see, there still is a lot we can talk about… 

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Opinion: The NFT Craze on the Art Market

Natallia Martchouk Leave a comment

Intro

trimplement co-founder Natallia Martchouk
trimplement co-founder Natallia Martchouk shares her thoughts about the NFT-based art

Everyone and his dog have been talking and writing about NFT (non-fungible tokens) in the last couple of months. I don’t know where exactly this hype is currently coming from. NFT is not a new concept, it has been around for a couple of years already. 

Back in February 2019, I wrote an article about different use cases of blockchain technology in art, which also mentions a couple of older non-fungible token projects like Crypto Kitties or Rare Pepe Trading Cards, so-called digital collectibles. In October 2019 we even started our very own NFT project Value Manifesto together with the art historian Timo Niemeyer, mechanical engineer Matthias Frank and producer of Nixie Tubes Dalibor Farny.

So, nothing new under the sun. But suddenly everybody is talking about the NFTs and NFT-based art is being sold for tens of Millions of dollars. It looks like the concept of certification of art ownership on the blockchain is suddenly lightning-fast going mainstream. However, what currently happens in the art market, rather reminds me of the famous dot-com bubble at the end of the 1990s. Let’s have a closer look at the events of the past few months.

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The Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci, photographed and a Tourist photographing it with his smartphone, symbolizing digital transformation of art (i.e. with blockchain).

6 Art Projects Powered by Blockchain

Natallia Martchouk Leave a comment

At a first glance blockchain and art are polar opposites. But how do they say:  Opposites attract. Blockchain technology can help to solve many issues of the modern art market, for example:

  • It can help to securely and transparently track provenance, copyright and ownership information
  • It can provide frameworks for tokenization of real-world art objects, simplifying access to the art market and allowing “ordinary mortals” to become art investors and get partial ownership on expensive assets (see e.g. Maecenas project description below)
  • Blockchain and cryptography can be the art environment itself, meaning they can be used to create and store digital art objects (like Crypto-Kitties described below)
  • And of course, it can help artists to collect fundings for their art projects using the mechanisms of the so-called ICO (initial coin offering)

Let’s have a look at the most popular and interesting blockchain and art projects where creativity meets technology.

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