Indicatively, the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, sold his first ever tweet for 2.9 million USD as an NFT, whilst DJ Justin Blau auctioned the “world’s first tokenized album” for 11.6 million USD. Introducing scarcity for born-digital assets for the first time ever, NFTs, or crypto- or digital collectibles, as they are also referred to, have already shown glimpses of their potential. Non-fungible tokens ( NFTs), which can be described as a new medium that enables the ownership and trading of digital assets of any kind, have been gaining an increasing amount of attention in recent months. However, recent advancements in technology have introduced new ways for revenue generation from museum images and digitised collections. In order to survive financially, museums and galleries have been forced to turn to solutions of last resort, such as redundancies and even deaccessions. Sustaining funding has always been one of the main challenges for museums and galleries with the recent COVID-19 pandemic severely aggravating the financial health of cultural heritage organisations. In this paper, we present the current state of affairs in relation to NFTs and the cultural heritage sector, identifying challenges, whilst highlighting opportunities that they create for revenue generation, in order to help address the ever-increasing financial challenges of galleries and museums. Concerns surrounding the environmental impact of blockchain technology and the rise of malicious projects, exploiting previously digitised heritage content made available through OpenGLAM licensing, have attracted criticism over the speculative use of the technology.
The potential of NFTs to generate significant revenue for artists and museums by selling effectively a cryptographically signed copy of a digital image (similar to real-world limited editions, which are signed and numbered copies of a given artwork), has sparked the interest of the financially deprived museum and heritage sector with world-renowned institutions such as the Uffizi Gallery and the Hermitage Museum, having already employed NFTs in order to raise funds.
Resulting from this technical development, this paper asks the question, do they provide an opportunity for fundraising for galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), by selling ownership of digital copies of their collections? Although NFTs in their current format were first invented in 2017 as a means for game players to trade virtual goods, they reached the mainstream in 2021, when the auction house Christie’s held their first-ever sale exclusively for an NFT of a digital image, that was eventually sold for a record 69 million USD. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) make it technically possible for digital assets to be owned and traded, introducing the concept of scarcity in the digital realm for the first time.
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