NEW ART FROM HEART Heart Evangelista is excited about the prospects of combining art and technology through NFTs. —Photo from Instagram of Heart Evangelista
The nonfungible token (NFT) industry in the Philippines is expected to balloon by an average of 46 percent yearly to reach $12.8 billion by 2028 from an estimated $2.6 billion in 2022, according to research from TechInsight360.
According to the strategy research and consulting company, the expansion of the NFT space in the Philippines is being driven by a high literacy rate in the country as well as the various events and webinars being held to promote NFT as a new asset class.
In particular, the partnership between pioneering crypto entrepreneur Luis Buenaventura II and celebrity influencer Heart Evangelista on an NFT in 2021 was cited as driving growth.
“This collaboration signaled a shift in the nascent but growing NFT industry in the Philippines,” TechInsight360 said.
Notably, this was the first time someone from the local entertainment industry, with 9 million followers, entered the NFT space,” it said, adding that the partnership was part of a social experiment to see where the Philippines’ NFT market stood when the global NFT industry recorded strong growth.
The collaboration involved two paintings that Evangelista made over the pandemic, and which were auctioned at global NFT marketplace OpenSea, respectively fetching P3.5 million and P3 million.
By definition NFTs are unique and cannot be replaced with something else, like a painting cannot be replaced with the exact same painting unlike currency where one peso can be traded with another one. It is this uniqueness, the fact that one NFT is unique that helps drive the value.
With NFT, the digital code which contains information about the one unique item — who created the artwork, when, etc. — acts as a certificate of ownership and authenticity which may be passed on from seller to buyer. With such a code, an artwork is “tokenized.”
Just like with crypto currency, the record or ledger of ownership can change with new information added [such as when a buyer becomes the new owner] but older data cannot be altered because the token is maintained across the hordes of computers across the world.
Thus, a token proves that the owner owns the “original” artwork. The rest — determining the value of an NFT — is up to the market. That is, between the seller and buyer. Of course, the more buyers are competing, a commodity’s market value rises.
Artists can earn from the NFTs by receiving royalty every time an NFT is resold, while NFT buyers can earn from the appreciation of the NFT, and also use it as an opportunity to support artists they feel connected to.
As the NFT awareness continued to grow in the country, the industry attracted various other homegrown projects which promoted Filipino culture.
For one, the National Book Development Board of the Philippines launched last October what it touted as the first NFT book ever to be dropped at the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair — titled “The Last Moon” — also through OpenSea.
Meanwhile, the La Union Surf Club dived into the scene through LUSCCares, which aims to raise funds by dropping — again through OpenSea — “digital surfboards” based on actual surfboards used in La Union waters.
“As NFT awareness continues to grow in the country, the demand for NFTs is going to increase among Filipinos, and if the NFT players can conduct workshops, exhibitions, and events to promote NFTs and spread awareness, the market can record strong growth over the next three to four years in the Philippines,” the company said.
An example of this is a two-part webinar that Union Bank of the Philippines (UnionBank), together with the non-profit Center for Art, New Ventures and Sustainable Development (CANVAS.PH) held in March 2022.
The webinar focused on NFTs to help artists, buyers, and collectors of digital art gain a better understanding of how the tokens work and how they can become a part of the NFT market.