Web phase One, Two, Three


Back to the Future Past

The Web transition story from 2.0 to 3.0


Let’s go back to 1997; early days of the digital frontier.

Y2K buzz hadn’t started yet, but something else was quietly expanding in the public sphere. 

Businesses in the United states, and in a few other locations around the world were connecting to a vast information highway known as the internet. 

Remember, the Desktop Personal Computer was also just entering offices, schools and a few homes at the time.


This computer internet connection came with its own web lexicon; - web sites, web chat rooms, web logs with comment sections blogs.

The traditional mail box was transformed to email, retrieved from a suite on its own website. 

Yahoo messenger was an instant messaging early sensation, hosting web chat rooms.


In Lagos, Cyber cafe’s were the rave at this point.

This digital transformation of a traditional means of communication (post mail) is the case in point. Post mail transformed to email, with this switch in interface also creating a changed user behaviour, and various new use cases. 

Your interaction with this medium changed the nature of messaging, just like the marked difference in tone between SMS texts and written notes.

Let’s go over them one after the other.

What changed a little ?

Shopping catalogues and the magazines they came in became scrollable pages.


What changed a lot ?

What new possibilities were created from this change in form ?

USE

Email served as the gateway to online experience, and became a means of signing up for web services on websites such as commerce (ebay), bookstores (amazon), online forums, among other early examples.

User Behaviour

chat rooms and other forms of instant messaging changed the speed at which  information passed - the feedback loop was shortened. This was the precursor to a lot of new applications.

These new possibilities are the case in point of digital transformation.

 So in viewing alternative investment options in the frame of what new possibilities have been created by their digital forms, we can chart an interesting new course to investing, and getting returns from new expanding markets.

Starting with art, we can explore the new market that has been created by technology.


What used to be

Art auctions are usually driven by the popularity of the artist and scarcity of works on sale.

So a painting by a world-famous master will attract a lot of interest from art collectors and museums worldwide, driving the sale price up. 

Auction houses prove the authenticity of art pieces by verifying the documentation, as well as scanning the artwork for age confirmation among others. This verification is necessary for indirect sales, as most transactions tend to be. Authenticity enables the sale and transfer of ownership rights to artwork, while scarcity creates appreciation in value.


Digital art sales have been limited by a deficit in two factors;

Scarcity was redundant, as the digital image could be duplicated to infinity with no means of verifying the source file.

Authenticity could not be proven, as watermarks were barely feasible for photographs,  less so for artworks.

A novel solution to these two problems came with recent technology. 

Cryptographic locks are older than the internet and computing entirely. A digital form of cryptography involves the use of multiple computers in a network to verify changes in a shared database, known as a blockchain. This technology has already seen great utility in an outstanding project known as; Bitcoin. 


Using this means of verification helped solve both problems of digital art distribution and monetization, as authenticity can now be determined, and exclusivity can be created from limited releases, thereby creating necessary scarcity for sales.

This has created a rapidly evolving marketplace of digital art items converted to Non-fungible Tokens (NFT’s) issued on a blockchain, usually Ethereum. Form is specified by name - non-fungible; origin is verified on a globally accessible record that can not be replaced or altered. 

All forms of digital media; audio, video or illustration can be tokenized as NFT’s, and sold on marketplaces online, the largest as at time of writing; opensea.io




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