Pizza is a popular food, a well-fermented round pizza dotted with aggressive cheese, gentle slices of fruit and diced meat. You often pay for such colorful pizza, the round pizza seems like a magic trap, waiting for countless diners to fall into it one after another.
Recently, Pizza Hut has introduced a special pizza, with the same bright appearance and plenty of delicious toppings, but only one of its slices is for sale after being cut. This slice of pizza is so special in its purchase and physical nature that you cannot buy it in any Pizza Hut store, nor can you smell its tantalizing aroma or touch its fluffy crust. To be more precise, it is a slice of pixelated pizza created by digital magic.
Listed on the NFT trading platform Rarible for 0.0001 ETH (about $1.145), the pixelated pizza is a symbol of Pizza Hut’s entry into the digital world. In fact, this piece of inedible pizza is an NFT digital image of the actual pizza, and Pizza Hut uploads a new slice of the pizza image every week for foodies to buy. It is said that due to the enthusiasm of buyers, a new slice of NFT pizza on the shelves has reached a price of 5 ETH (about RMB 57,274.2).
Pizza Hut calls the pizza “the world’s most permanent pizza” and is excited to bring the delicious food into the digital world. However, spending a huge amount of money on a slice of virtual pizza that has no utility and lacks value for money seems to be a puzzling act. Is this a new future for technology or a technology bubble that will soon burst?
Virtual pizza actually makes use of the new blockchain technology in the Internet – NFT, the full name is Non-Fungible Token, also known as non-homogenized tokens. It generally refers to digital works, which are digitized content such as images, text, video, audio, etc. uploaded to the Ethernet blockchain to generate a unique, non-tamperable string of code. In other words, any form of content on the Internet can generate a unique number on the blockchain, and the work can be protected by using blockchain technologies such as confirmation, pure evidence and traceability.
Simply put, using this blockchain technology, we can generate a painting, a song, a video into digital content and sell it in the online world for trade, thus you have a digital asset issued on the blockchain. nft is used in a wide range of fields and is now accepted by a variety of groups, including digital artists, musicians, designers, sports teams, etc. Also, many influential brands and luxury companies have joined in and produced their own NFT products.
The International Olympic Committee launched the Olympic collection of NFT badges, from the traditional physical badges to new digital badges, is a development trend of Olympic-themed digital entertainment experience; “Time” magazine has also kept up with the trend, jumping out of the identity of the paper magazine, will be their most iconic 3 issues of the cover image and its collection made into four NFT for sale auction; Coca-Cola is more creative, its use of Coca-Cola is more creative, using NFT technology to “resurrect” a pixelated 1956 classic vending machine, which is called the “Friendship Box”, and opening this exciting virtual space, all kinds of Coca-Cola exclusive digital collectibles come pouring in, including a feather bubble jacket The virtual space is called the “Friendship Box” and opens to an exciting virtual space where a variety of Coca-Cola-exclusive digital collectibles come in, including a down bubble jacket, friendship cards and more.
These badges that cannot be worn in real life, magazine covers that cannot be flipped through, and digital clothing that cannot be worn on the body are highly sought after. In addition to people’s freshness and curiosity about the new trend of technology, NFT actually has more serious real power.
In 2021, the first pure digital art work “Every Day: The First 5,000 Days” was sold at Christie’s for $69.34 million (about RMB 450 million), which is a JPG collection of works created by artist Mike Winkelman on a daily basis for more than 5,000 days since May 2007, i.e. a giant collage work. Since May 2007, he has been creating and posting a new work of art online every day, eventually stitching together 5,000 images of his work into a single 316-megabyte JPG file.
Buying a JPG file instead of a physical painting sounds like a futuristic sci-fi scenario, and the astounding prices fetched by the auction. But the secret behind the auction is that the auction closed until the last minute with a total of 2.2 million visitors visiting the auction page, and such a huge number of hits also gave some inspiration to traditional artworks.
The use of NFT technology can give some traditional artwork a chance to regain its luster. As we all know, the lack of circulation of many traditional artworks, such as the famous paintings in museums, can only be traded through fixed venues and auction houses, which leads to traditional artworks can only be appreciated and discovered in a small area. And through the form of NFT, artists can issue their artworks on the on-chain platform for extensive display, which not only gets rid of the restrictions of the transaction form, but also increases the number of clicks, and the related art costs are naturally lower.
At the same time, NFT also brings copyright protection for buyers and sellers due to its non-reproducible and unique characteristics. For example, some luxury brands have initiated bundled sales of NFTs and physical products. This means that when a buyer buys a product, he also buys a unique and irreproducible NFT, so he can be well assured that he is buying an authentic product, thus regulating the luxury market.
What is the point of buying an NFT image that can be screenshotted and used infinitely? Or, when we buy such an NFT, what do we actually really own compared to buying a physical artwork?NFT is different from traditional artwork and collectibles, it is ultimately a virtual object that cannot be touched, and thus people have doubts about the meaning of buying it, i.e. where the value of the virtual object is.
There is only one answer: buying it proves that you are the only owner of the image, but it does not mean that you are the only user. This unveils the mindset of those who spend large sums of money, that is, they gain an identity while buying a digital artwork. The digital tendency is more to take reason out of the equation and pursue a pure empathy for the artwork.
NFT quietly breaks down the border between the virtual and the real, and it poses pointed questions to people: is real value the only value of an object? Many people still question such virtual value, while it turns out that items with virtual value have usually passed the test of time and slowly built up a sense of identity in the minds of consumers.
Whether NFT is a flash in the pan or the development trend of technology, let’s wait and see the power of this virtual together.
