These creatives aren’t just reaching niche collectors anymore. NFT trading volume surged to $10.7 billion in Q3 2021, a 704% increase from the previous quarter, and a 38,060% increase year-over-year. The NFT ecosystem is seeing nearly 40,000 new users arrive every two months, and the average price of an NFT is on the rise. 

Even Pitchfork gave NFTs a good review.

NFTs give artists and musicians meaningful control over their work and compensation in ways Web 2.0 promised but couldn’t deliver on. Central platforms such as streaming services took most of the value created by their stars, treating them as commodities and leaving just pennies on the table as payment. Distribution is king, making serfs out of everyone else. 

If you’re an artist or musician and you want to abolish and rebuild the systems controlling your work, the time to create on crypto is now. But with all the options and marketplaces available today, not to mention an increasing number of creative ways to use NFTs, deciding how and what to build can be overwhelming. Which blockchain should you trust with your NFTs? What form could your creative endeavor take?

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The Case for Bitcoin NFTs

While you have a wide variety of choices, we recommend trying out the most secure, most durable, and most decentralized blockchain that has the most users, most capital, and biggest brand in crypto: Bitcoin. 

Bitcoin’s market cap is 2x more than that of the early NFT incumbent, Ethereum. Your fans are far more likely to have BTC than ETH in their digital wallets, and buying NFTs backed by the power of the Bitcoin blockchain makes the decision easier.

Bitcoin, the fully decentralized network, is the best blockchain to support the paradigm shift of control we’re witnessing: With Bitcoin, no central owner or platform determines your distribution, and Bitcoin can provide unparalleled durability and stability for the assets you create and own.

Until recently, building NFTs for Bitcoin wasn’t easy, and even Rare Pepes, while innovative didn't have the opportunity to take off on Bitcoin (Rare Pepes have even showed up as "wrapped" assets on other L1s). Stacks' novel approach is the first to introduce Bitcoin NFTs that allow for NFT programmability through expressive smart contracts enabling royalties and on-chain marketplaces that can read, react to and settle on Bitcoin all without clogging the main Bitcoin chain. Along with easy-to-use tools from Hiro, Stacks has opened the door for creatives to engage with the dominant blockchain. In just six steps, you could have your NFT project up-and-running. Need more help? Join us on Discord and head to the #dev-general channel with your questions. 

Leveling the Playing Field While Stacking Royalties 

“NFTs are putting value and attention back into art,” singer-songwriter Imogen Heap recently said. “Whatever musicians are clutching at to eke more out of a system that gives us scraps, the application of blockchain, NFTs, and the tech branching from these is where the answers lie... This could be what finally turns the music industry as we know it into a sustainable industry, where everyone gets paid what they’re worth and everyone who does something useful stays in the game.”

You’ll never need to go through a lawyer to chase down a payment again with NFTs. Each time an NFT is sold, a percentage of the sale goes straight to the artist, and this process is controlled through a smart contract, not layers of handlers or excuses. Artists can also receive automatic payments on the secondary market through the smart contracts as well as fractionalizing ownership of assets. This puts power back in the hands of creatives. 

With Bitcoin NFTs built with Stacks, artists can also benefit from a unique financial characteristic of Stacks’ blockchain design. Stacks can be leveraged to create a growing, ongoing annuity for a project or cause of the artist's choice by setting up the contract to automatically send a set percentage of transactions, in both initial auction and all secondary purchases, to a "vault" where it can earn a roughly 10% yield in pure BTC. This mechanism is the same that MiamiCoin used to accumulate over $7 million in reserves for the city of Miami in just a few weeks (as of the publication date for this post, the Miami City Wallet balance is valued at over $16 million).

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Expanding the Metaverse with Bitcoin NFTs

NFTs aren’t just limited to graphic art, video clips, or songs. When Kings of Leon released their album this year in the form of an NFT, they offered various kinds of tokens including one that offered front row seats at their live shows for life. And in the gaming world, the number of games offering NFTs as items like virtual plots of land or armor is exploding. Sky Mavis, for example, recently raised $152 million at a ~$3 billion valuation to grow Axie Infinity, which monetizes via NFTs. Sales of the NFT characters have now reached $33 million a day.

If you have a unique idea for your Bitcoin NFT, a developer in the Stacks ecosystem can probably help you build it. Hiro works every day to build the best tools for these developers, and if you’re a brand looking to get started, but need help with the first steps, we’d love to chat. 

In the meantime, peruse our suggested collection of players in the Bitcoin NFT ecosystem to learn more.

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‍This is #1
‍The world-renowned visual artist, Chemical X, presents a curated collection of unique NFT artworks, including collaborations with iconic figures like Cara Delevingne and Fatboy Slim.

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‍Layer
Layer offers simple NFT minting and marketing for your superfans. On top of that, you’ll have access to easy sales analytics. 

Arties Cosmic Robot Club
The Arties Cosmic Robot Club isn’t your average NFT collection. Arties want to help create a transparent, democratized market for art lovers everywhere.

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‍Megapont
Megapont is a pixel art NFT project about a fictional universe in which advanced scientific mutations accelerated the evolutions of every species on Earth.

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Stacks Art 
The original NFT marketplace on Stacks, Stacks Art gives users quick and easy access to digital collectibles to explore, buy, and sell from different collections including the wildly popular Stacks Punks and Stacks Pops collections.

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‍Byzantion.xyz
‍Byzantion is an NFT minting and marketplace platform that gives artists a simple, trusted home to host their digital art collections. Artists can also benefit from secondary sales on Byzantion’s market via royalties paid to them on every subsequent sale.

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STX NFT
‍STX NFT is a marketplace aggregator and NFT release platform that offers a beautiful UX to browse collections and bid on digital artwork. It also has a gallery feature where a user can enter their Stacks address and view all the NFTs in their account.