Film Financing Mavens, Banks Flirt With the Wild West World of Cryptocurrency
Angus Finney “Computers are useless,” Pablo Picasso exclaimed more than 50 years ago. “They can only give you answers.” No doubt he would be turning in his grave at today’s alliance of computer programs, tech companies and digital artists clustering together to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs). It’s a quickly evolving and potentially very risky world for filmmakers, producers and others looking for new ways to raise funding but should be approached with caution, research and a good look at recent history. NFTs — in case you need reminding — are digital artworks and images, often carved up into bite-sized tokens, that rely on blockchain technology to prove ownership. The explosion in interest and speculation around NFTs and the wider crypto currency craze that heated up during the previous decade has now spectacularly imploded over the past six months, with more than $2 trillion wiped out. The burst bubble in digital assets and decentralized finance (DeFi) has attracted acute attention, but also pain for millions of investors given that by mid-2021 more than 16% of the American population had bought into the crypto craze.