By Chris Cummings, CEO & Founder of Iconic Moments
Goal of preservation
the greatest strength of the blockchain is its permanence through decentralization and is publically accessible at any moment. So, if you are really trying to ensure the preservation of any item the best way to do that is through the blockchain and this is because if one system goes down it doesn’t matter, if 100,000 systems go down it doesn’t matter. It’s near impossible to take the blockchain down as a whole.
Engage digitally
We also think it matters to museums for many other reasons. It’s a way to engage with new visitors digitally. There are millions of people around the world that are engaging with NFTs – people that may never walk through the doors of a museum. But they would walk through the doors of a digital museum. Museums could engage with them and increase access and reach.
Create online exhibitions
It’s a new way to create exhibitions and that’s true in a number of ways, for example, through online and actual hardware installations showing the digital pieces themselves.
Exploring the metaverse
Metaverses are beginning to pop up all over and what most people don’t understand is that you can take an NFT into a metaverse and display it. These could be NFTs of historical items displayed in a digital museum within a metaverse or in a game that millions of people can play at the same time.
Drive revenue
It’s also a great way to drive revenue through sales and it’s not just in the short-term but in the long-term. You can write into the contract of an NFT that any time the token resells the museum is going to essentially receive a royalty. In a traditional museum if you had a limited edition print you only make money the first time you sell it but with an NFT over the next 20 years, if it sells 500 times the museum would receive 500 times what royalty was agreed upon with an average of 5-7%.
Embracing new technology
I also think it’s important for museums to embrace new technology. We are in an industry that is so fearful of technology and fearful of the internet, but approaching it with a values-led mindset can help to ease these concerns and guide museums into this new and emerging space.
Provenance and lineage
When you create an NFT you can see who the original owner is or the original creator, you can see when they created it and what they sold it for. Then you can trace its entire history on when it was resold forever. When you think of the world of museums, think about how often in the museum world a museum has accidently bought a fake painting, a fake document – they’ve essentially been hoodwinked into thinking something is real but wasn’t and this is billions of dollars in purchases. The reason NFTs are good from a digital creation perspective is that this is impossible. There is the ability for you to always to know where an item came from and to trace that history and that’s why it’s an evolution of the technology we want for provenance and a digital forward approach.
