Just When You Thought the NFT Hype Couldn't Get Crazier, This 'Meta NFT' Is Trying to Sell Colors
The NFT craze has been throwing us curveballs left and right. A $4 million NFT of the Doge meme? In honor of shitposting, we accept it. A $5.4 million NFT by whistleblower Edward Snowdon? Justified by the right to data privacy. A $69 million NFT of a giant collage by Beeple? Reasonable in the name of digital art.
But colors? That’s a bit of a stretch. Web3 has always tried to push the limits, but this new “meta NFT” that’s trying to claim ownership of colors is slightly pushing it. The digital Color Museum is the latest NFT marketplace to debut on Web3, and it’s setting itself apart by selling NFTs of NFTs—a Meta NFT called a color NFT. Confused? So we are we.
The Color Museum’s color NFTs will essentially give buyers ownership of one of the 10,000 sRGB colors on sale. The catch is ownership will be limited to Color Museum’s NFT marketplace. If another NFT is sold on the marketplace using minted colors, the owner of that color will get royalties from that particular NFT. But if the NFT is sold on another platform, like OpenSea, then the owner will not get royalties.
An example of a color NFT.
If you think about it, it’s similar to the trademarked Hermes orange, Tiffany & Co. blue, or Cadbury purple. Only, by buying these color NFTs, you might just create another source of income for yourself.
Once buyers own a color, they can label it, attach a description to it, and gain royalties whenever another NFT on the platform uses that particular color—or anything close to it. The Color Museum has it down to a science—if an unclaimed color is used, the profits could potentially go to the nearest claimed color on the sRGB grid based on the Euclidean distance between colors.
Meanwhile, royalties will be calculated down to the pixel based on the proportional use of a color on an NFT. For example, if an NFT is sold for $10,000 (let’s use dollars instead of Ethereum to keep things simple) on the platform, then Color Museum will claim a 1.5 percent transaction fee worth $1,500. If one NFT is made up of 60 percent gold, then the owner of said gold color NFT will get 60 percent of the $1,500 transaction fee. If multiple colors are part of the art, then multiple owners will get their own slice of the cake.
According to its leader Omar Farooq, Color Museum is essentially “turning colors into money.”
“Fair is fair,” said Color Museum on its website.
And Vice described the platform as a “communal form of capitalism.”
Color us unimpressed. Altruistic capitalism doesn’t exist, so we won’t pretend that commodified colors are fair or charitable by any means. But we will go out on a limb and admit that the idea of color NFTs is so crazy that it might work. In spite of the collective bewilderment of the NFT craze, the hype is only getting bigger and the valuations and sales just keep going through the roof. Color NFTs assure a slice of the pie in the same way traders hold stocks, but its success will depend entirely on the demand of color NFTs and the performance of the Color Museum platform.
Everything in the crypto world, Metaverse, and Web3 are in the experimental stage, but this is one experiment we’ll be keeping an eye on.
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