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#069: How & Why To Sell Art as an Onchain Collectible

There’s one word you need to know if you want to earn an income for your art: diversification.

From making your first sale to achieving a sustainable living from your art, the key is .diversification. It’s essential for artists to diversify how they share and sell their work. Diversification allows you to connect with different audiences, each with unique habits, budgets, and goals. It also encourages you to experiment and view your creative practice from new perspectives that can ultimately help push you forward in your career.

One way to diversify your revenue is by selling digital versions of your art as onchain collectibles, made even easier with HUG’s new tools in our Artist Shops.

Let’s talk about it.

What is an Onchain Collectible?

An onchain collectible is any form of digital media that you would like to be collected on the blockchain, a decentralized public ledger (i.e. book of records) that makes the data recorded on it both secure and immutable. This is also commonly known as a non-fungible token (NFT).

Putting your work onchain means recording your digital media on the blockchain, a secure and immutable public ledger, by minting it as a non-fungible token (NFT). This process provides a permanent certificate of ownership and authenticity, known as provenance, which is crucial as AI adoption grows. NFTs offer creators long-lasting attribution and control over their work, ensuring its history and ownership are always clear, even as it changes hands. This shift to onchain is part of the ongoing evolution of the internet, making onchain the new online.

Benefits of putting your work onchain:

• Create a permanent record of your artwork that you can refer to in any event of copyright or intellectual property dispute

• Document who has owned your artwork at any one point in time, even if it changes ownership

• Expand your reach and sell your work to an international audience of digital art collectors who collect onchain

First Impressions & New Developments

To understand why a new technology is special, it’s important to understand its history. In 2021, onchain collectibles experienced a boom to the tune of a $40 billion market. However, many artists who are largely unfamiliar with NFTs still hesitate, knowing them as the subject of controversy for their history of adverse environmental impact and high cost of use especially with the original cryptocurrency, Bitcoin.

Since then, the technology has advanced rapidly and improved greatly! While there are many different blockchains for artists to use, such as Solana or Polygon, one of the most popular is Ethereum. In September 2022, the Ethereum Merge reduced the Ethereum blockchain’s energy consumption and carbon footprint by 99.99%.

Another financial friction point for adoption was the cost of “gas”, or a fee paid to process a transaction on the blockchain. With Ethereum Layer 2 (L2) solutions like Base, that too is a thing of the past.

Take your art onchain with Base

Developed by leading cryptocurrency company Coinbase, Base is a secure, low-cost, developer-friendly Ethereum L2 built to bring the next billion users to web3 through more accessible technology. As an L2 blockchain, it addresses previous issues of energy efficiency and financial barriers by enabling exponentially faster and cheaper processing.

In honor of Base’s ease of use for creators of all kinds, they are hosting their second annual Onchain Summer and celebrating onchain music, art, food, gaming, and more. HUG is right on time because we’ve just launched our Artist Storefronts that support selling art onchain with Base!

How do I sell an onchain collectible on HUG?

If you aren’t already, the first step is to become a HUG Artist and set up a shop of your own. You can sign up here.

Once you’re a HUG Artist, you’ll be granted access to our Shop Manager and you’ll be able to sell and share your art in any way you like - as fine art prints, digital downloads, and onchain collectibles! Later this summer, we’ll even have features for print-on-demand merchandise and ship-it-yourself options.

Any digital creation can be collected and owned onchain.

With HUG, you can upload JPG, PNG, GIF, MP4, or PDFs. Get creative and upload anything from an original song, photograph, drawing, or even writing that you would like to sell as an onchain collectible.

To sell your digital creations as onchain collectibles, simply upload it as an Onchain Collectible with your HUG Shop Manager. You’ll be able to add details and even set suggested creator royalties (secondary resale profits) before publishing, which will instantly tokenize and list your media on the Base blockchain.

Remember gas fees? As a bonus from Base’s efficiency, HUG covers the nominal gas fees that artists are normally asked to pay.

How do I buy an Onchain Collectible?

Most NFT marketplaces require the ownership of a crypto wallet and cryptocurrency funds to buy and sell art onchain. However, HUG is not just an NFT marketplace. HUG is an art marketplace, and we want to make it easy for creators and collectors alike to go onchain and benefit from this new technology.

After you’ve listed your art for sale as an Onchain Collectible, your buyers can visit your HUG Artist Shop and check out in a few clicks with Paypal. No crypto necessary.

Still have more questions about how to sell your first onchain collectible with HUG? We’ve got answers ⤵️

Closing Thoughts

Diversification is essential for a successful art career, and HUG is dedicated to showing, telling, and empowering you with easier ways to diversify your approach to entrepreneurship.

Onchain Collectibles are an avenue for diversification that many artists are underutilizing as a tool to document and sell their work, historically due to technological and financial barriers to entry. With the efficiency of Base and the accessibility of HUG’s tool, buying and selling art onchain has never been more effortless.

Onchain Summer is just heating up with our partners at Base, and we’d love to help shine some sunlight on your art. With HUG, Onchain Collectibles are easy to sell and easy to buy, so why not give it a try?

Artist Grants and Opportunities

• 🏆  $10,000 Grand Prize for Artists & Designers: The Onchain Foundation is seeking artists to design their upcoming membership collection. 10 artists will be awarded $500 each, with 1 artist receiving a $10,000 commission to complete the collection.

• 🗽 Summer-time Showcase at the Oculus WTC: Transient Labs & Canvas 3.0 are seeking summer-time themed art for exhibition.

• 📖 Publication Opportunity & Artist Grant: ARCHIV3 is seeking to spotlight digital artists and innovators to spotlight.

• 🖼️ Exhibit Your AI Art in a Gallery: Colonna Contemporary is seeking AI-collaborative artists to display in their physical and virtual gallery space.

• 💰 HUG is giving away $12,000 USD annually in artist grants in support of emerging artists.

This Week’s Art Drops

Did you know that these are just 8 of hundreds of art drops on HUG? Get a full list of this week’s art drops from HUG here.