Have you ever looked at digital art and thought; “I wish I could somehow.. own this?”, perhaps you wondered about if it would ever be possible to have an art market, but for digital art. But it wouldn’t be possible, because any and everyone could just get a digital copy of the file. This is what cryptoart solves; cryptoart introduces digital scarcity and proven ownership to digital artworks.

Blockchain technology, specifically ‘NFTs’ or ‘Non-Fungible Tokens’ allow digital artworks to have digital scarcity, by letting an NFT represent ownership of a digital work. Thanks to this solution, digital art is now able to become a huge market, much like traditional art, and many digital artists are already making their full-time incomes from selling digital works.

The cryptoart market is growing at an extremely rapid rate, with in December 2020 alone having $8.2M in artworks sold, a 3x increase from the previous month.

Cryptoart isn’t only attractive to digital artists, but also highly attractive to investors and collectors. Collectors of digital art are able to re-list these artworks for sale on the secondary market for their own desired price, if done with correct factors in mind, such as an artists popularity, or a growing artist, old artworks, highly demanded artworks, quality of the work etcetera, a lot of profit is made. Just like the traditional art market, but now digital.

This new innovation is growing rapidly, and 2021 will be no different. SIGN Art launched January 18th (2021) on the Waves Blockchain, further improving on the first cryptoart markets by solving problems such as transaction costs, transaction speeds, license clarity, proven authenticity and user experience; markets aren’t only there to purchase art, but also to admire it — for the value of art doesn’t come from the ability to admire, but the ownership.

Take an example: The Mona Lisa.

Anyone can admire the Mona Lisa currently, it’s not where the almost $1B valuation (if accounted for inflation) comes from. This valuation is for having ownership of the authentic Mona Lisa.

Hence why SIGN Art is designed as a gallery, with the ability for users to discover high quality art, as well as the ability to collect this art if desired.

Cryptoart is kind of like Bitcoin in its early days, many are skeptical, don’t understand it and don’t understand why it’s growing exponentially. The early adopters, in this case collectors and artists will be greatly rewarded just like early Bitcoin investors as the market grows, shown by some of the earliest crypto artworks having great ROI for their collectors already.

And now with SIGN Art on the Waves Blockchain, cryptoart just became an even more scalable and advanced market. Come and join the cryptoart evolution on the Waves Blockchain!

This article originally appeared on SIGN Medium.