“I’m a geriatic Millennial,” laments Alexis Ohanian, the 38-year-old cofounder of Reddit. “Even I don’t understand it all.”



He’s referring not to the online oddities—memes, GIFs, NSFW comment threads— that have turned Reddit into&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/02/08/fresh-off-gamestop-mania-reddit-raises-250-million-in-new-funding/">a prosperous virtual hangout spot</a>&nbsp;with over 50 million users. Instead, he’s talking about another topic that takes up a lot of the internet’s attention today: NFTs.



As a guy who’s lived on the web for decades, Ohanian’s being modest, but his comment gets at a core truth. The NFT world is a hard-to-navigate space, full of unfamiliar people, complex ideas and jargon galore, like what even is an NFT. (For the record, it is a non-fungible token,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/02/26/what-is-an-nft-and-should-you-buy-one/">a digital collectible or art</a>&nbsp;bought and sold through online marketplaces.) Ohanian will do his best to work through it all as the cohost of a podcast launching today dedicated to NFTs,&nbsp;<a href="https://itsprobablynothing.xyz/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“Probably Nothing,</a>” available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, the name a nod to how the virtual asset is often dismissed as fundamentally worthless.



For a cohost, Ohanian has teamed up with another internet enthusiast,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2020/09/23/everything-youve-wanted-to-know-about-gen-z-but-were-afraid-to-ask/?sh=3425d5cf3d19">24-year-old Tiffany Zhong</a>, whose startup, Islands, offers a platform for digital influencers looking to better monetize their following. The pair originally met at a Y-Combinator hackathon in 2014 when Zhong was still in high school: She went and a built a speed-reading app, he was then a Y-Combinator partner. (Ohanian has also since started his own venture capital firm, Seven Seven Six.) They struck up a friendship more recently after noticing they had similar interests on Twitter.



“We were just exchanging NFT memes with each other, talking about interesting projects. It’s grown out of a conversation we’ve had in our DMs”—their direct messages between each other on Twitter—“for several months,” says Zhong.



They’re not the only ones thinking about NFTs, which have become one of the biggest stories of 2021. A year ago, the digital assets recorded less than $10 million a month in sales. By constrast, $323 million worth of NFTs traded hands on a single day in August, a record unbeaten for now.MORE FOR YOU<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/09/23/in-bid-for-growth-a-new-clubhouse-feature-aims-to-increase-private-chats/">A New Clubhouse Feature Aims To Increase Small, Private Chats—And Deeper Engagement</a><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/09/22/facebook-apple-privacy-change-software/">Facebook Admits It Reported Faulty Numbers To Advertisers, Blames Apple</a><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/09/13/aocs-tax-the-rich-dress--ultimate-fashion-statement-or-display-of-hypocrisy/">AOC’s ‘Tax The Rich Dress’ – Ultimate Fashion Statement Or Display Of Hypocrisy</a>



But as even money and attention has picked up, the space remains seperate from the regulated world of mainstream finance and investment, making it a place uncomfortably rife with speculation and speculators. To defend against any criticism of bias, Zhong and Ohanian say they will be open about their own crypto investments on the podcast and have publicly published links to the digital wallets containing their holdings. “People are starting to looking for more content in this space, to look for people who are not trying to pull a fast one,” Zhong says. “We want to be the go-to space with legitimate guests and topics that span being a collector, a creator and an investor in this space.”



Unsurprisingly, many of those guests aren’t exactly household names, such as Farokh Sarmad, an active NFT investor, and ThankYouX, an artist whose work has been sold by Phillips auction house. Zhong and Ohanian also plan on speaking to people like Keith Grossman, the president of&nbsp;Time&nbsp;magazine, which&nbsp;<a href="https://time.com/5948741/time-nft-covers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">has offered</a>&nbsp;some of its archival covers as NFTs, and Noah Davis, the Christie’s executive who helped established the company as an early mover in this world through&nbsp;<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2021/03/11/beeple-art-sells-for-693-million-becoming-most-expensive-nft-ever/">a record-setting $69.3 million sale</a>&nbsp;of a collage by the artist Beeple in March.



It was around that same time when Ohanian “was talking about the future investment portfolio and how it was gonna look much different,” he recalls. “It’s not going to be just stocks and bonds.”



“The same trends that made Reddit work 16 years ago, are now acting out way more effectively, way faster,” he says, pointing to the speed at which fast online communities can form and flourish today. “And that&#8217;s pretty damn exciting.”



By Abram Brown, Forbes Staff

Web Summit 2018

A New Alexis Ohanian Podcast Hopes To Be A Clarifying Guide To NFTs

Art’s valuable digital future, a recent boom in NFT sales and blockchain with an important role in preserving an artist’s legacy.



“The first thing I tell people when I&#8217;m talking to them about NFTs and cryptoart is ‘don’t overthink it’. When I first entered the space, I didn&#8217;t fully understand what I was doing. I had to learn by doing,” says Nigerian-born Prince&nbsp;Jacon&nbsp;Osinachi, a self-taught digital artist who found his voice using Microsoft Word.



Years before NFTs became a thing, Osinachi entered the cryptoart space in 2017 when he discovered the R.A.R.E Art&nbsp;platform.



“As an artist, I wanted to show my work beyond Instagram. I wanted to reach a wider audience,” he explains. “They were talking about something called cryptoart which means you put your art on the blockchain. A lot of people get to see it and you also get the chance to sell it.”



NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are a way of buying or selling anything digital – like art – using cryptocurrency. As little as four years ago, people were not collecting art on the blockchain but Osinachi saw its potential and the following year, his work was taken to&nbsp;Ethereal Summit (where Edward Snowden was a key speaker this May).&nbsp;



“The current hype we&#8217;ve seen in the NFT space started around late 2019 when people started paying attention to, and collecting cryptoart. The pandemic helped to boost this because people weren’t going to physical galleries. The blockchain became a space where people could converge and look at good art.”



Osinachi is currently hosting virtual workshops to help onboard African artists into the cryptoart space. He believes that while the NFT space will co-exist with traditional art going forward, blockchain has an important role in preserving an artist’s legacy.



“The space is growing. I wouldn’t say that in its entirety it is going to be the future of art, but for artists like myself, it is something that has changed digital arts. People can now collect digital art, as opposed to copying and pasting it and then claiming that they own it,” he adds.



“The metadata on the ownership is on the blockchain – this means there&#8217;s provable scarcity which makes it a valuable. For digital artists, it’s a big leap.”



Using digital art marketplaces like SuperRare, Osinachi has managed to sell his work to global collectors, many of whom are anonymous. The beauty of blockchain is that when Osinachi’s art moves from one buyer to another, as a creator, he is always aware of this exchange and his royalty fee of 10% is ensured for life, no matter how much a piece sells for. For a collector, an NFT doesn’t necessarily mean owning the art, rather the payment is for the metadata and this opens up the possibility of reselling the NFT at a later stage for more money.



“Whoever gets to buy the art doesn’t get to lock it up like they do in the traditional art world. Anybody can see it and know that this wallet address owns this work. And in terms of teaching African history, anybody can have access to it,” explains Osinachi.



Not just making money, but digitizing art history



For Osinachi, there is far more to the blockchain than the world of finance, cryptocurrency. While the recent boom in NFT sales has seen many artists considering minting their creations, it has also led to social change – the ability to preserve art history previously stored in physical archives.



Mohamed Amin’s historical Camerapix collection, for example, contains 2.5 million still photographs and 6,000 hours of raw video footage capturing African history. Considered one of the world’s greatest unexplored historical archives, it contains images of the events surrounding post-colonial Africa, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Amin’s son, Salim Amin, has been working tirelessly to categorize and digitize this collection and ultimately bring it into a format that is presentable to the world – onto Ethereum.



“When this whole NFT craze started, a lot of artists saw it as a way to make money. What it really is, is a new technology that will unlock many new monetization models, not just for artists. It’s a way to craft a story,” says Andrew Berkowitz, the project lead for $Afrofuture, an Ethereum-based social currency looking to unlock new funding for African creatives.



“Blockchain is a whole new model for how we can take these archives and start to really roll them out into the world in a way that catalyses conversations and creates a community.”



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile" style="grid-template-columns:44% auto"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="681" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Osinachi2-1024x681.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51865 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Osinachi2-1024x681.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Osinachi2-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Osinachi2-768x511.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Osinachi2-1536x1022.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Osinachi2-2048x1362.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“The current hype we&#8217;ve seen in the NFT space started around late 2019 when people started paying attention to, and collecting cryptoart.” – Prince&nbsp;Jacon&nbsp;Osinachi, digital artist</blockquote>
</div></div>



Working closely with Camerapix and The Mohammed Amin Foundation, Berkowitz is exploring new ways for historical archives to be presented to the world (and monetized). He’s created something called the Genesis NFT Drop where five, rare images from Amin’s archive will be up for auction every quarter as NFTs. The proceeds from each sale will be used to commission African artists, provide grants to museums to help them preserve their content digitally and train local archivists. (Currently, The Mohamed Amin Foundation flies in archivists from Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom to Nairobi to store content and retrieve metadata.)



“We&#8217;ve digitized whatever we can with the resources that we have, but we&#8217;ve only scratched the surface,” says Amin’s son Salim, the chairman of Camerapix and The Mohamed Amin Foundation.



“NFTs are a new platform but for us, it&#8217;s another opportunity to be able to showcase the work, hopefully raise some money, train young Africans across the continent into being good archivists and preserving our content, our storytelling, and not lose this very precious history that we have.”



“And we want this to serve as a new model because there&#8217;s plenty of these historical archives all over the world… it&#8217;s a way to use this new technology and it&#8217;s not just about making money. Our aim to change the way African history is taught and appreciated across the world,” adds Berkowitz.



<div class="wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile"><figure class="wp-block-media-text__media"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="1024" height="768" src="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Andrew-B-1024x768.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-51866 size-full" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Andrew-B-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Andrew-B-300x225.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Andrew-B-768x576.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Andrew-B-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Andrew-B-2048x1536.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></figure><div class="wp-block-media-text__content">
<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“What blockchain really is, is a new technology that will unlock many new monetization models, not just for artists.” – Andrew Berkowitz, the project lead for $Afrofuture, an Ethereum-based social currency looking to unlock new funding for African creatives</blockquote>
</div></div>



From Momint, a new South African social media marketplace where creators can sell their works as NFTs, to the Worldart gallery in Cape Town launching its first NFT gallery auction by local artist Norman O’Flynn, the local NFT scene is only getting bigger.



Says Osinachi: “We&#8217;re only just scratching the surface in terms of what the blockchain can do for us. Whatever you can think of, the blockchain is there to help and as time goes on, we&#8217;re going to be seeing some interesting use cases arise.”



By Tiana Cline

Tag: Cyrptoart

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

A New Alexis Ohanian Podcast Hopes To Be A Clarifying Guide To NFTs

Why NFTs Are Having An Arty Moment