In Web 3.0, anything goes, even the ability to possess color, a power once thought to be exclusive to companies like Coca-Cola, Tiffany & Co, and Hermès. Playing god with colors on the blockchain, a new NFT marketplace called the Color Museum is selling 10,000 RGB hues and granting the rights to them.
Wait, owning and lording over one of the thousands of colors in the world? The initiative, however, has been met with many critics.
Possess a flush in NFT. Color Museum, which is starting a new market for Non-Fungible Tokens, has quickly gained online interest (and extreme skepticism) since it launched its pre-sale waiting list on OpenSea. The concept is what Omar Farooq, the 31-year-old leader of the collective, refers to as “a meta NFT,” meaning that by owning the rights to a specific color, people can earn “royalties” every time an image is viewed. NFTs that use that color are sold through the market.
The amount they earn depends on the selling price of the image and the proportion of that color used in the NFT image. “We are going to turn colors into money,” Farooq said in this Vice article.
7 colors were consecrated today on the Ethereum blockchain. They include the first red (Rosy Red), the first pink (Pinkalot), the first gray (Bored Grey), and the first off black (Nearly Black). The tone is being set. minted by @RandsterK, @NedArcher1 and associates. pic.twitter.com/vxisTHl0SF
— Color Museum (@colordotmuseum) January 29, 2022
What are we talking about? the company is already selling the property of 10,000 different hues extracted from sRGB (or Standard Red Green Blue), which is a standardized color grid developed by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for computer programs in the 1990s. choose and buy its color, you can rename it or even write a description for it. One way to give it a personality, according to the website: “tell the universe what your color means.”
How does it work? On their website, they put as an example a photo of a Bored Ape for sale for 247.1 ETH (around 700,000 euros). The Museum would impose a transaction fee of 1.25% on both the seller and the buyer, obtaining a total of 17,564 euros. Half of that would go to the Color Museum team, and the remaining €8,782 would be divided proportionally between the owners of the various colors, based on the percentage of each color that could be found in the 398,161 pixels of the image.
If a color is used that is not owned by anyone, the money goes to the owner of the next closest color on the sRGB color space grid “as determined by Euclidean distance”.
the rarity. While sRGB has 16.7 million distinct colors, Color Museum only plans to sell 10,000 of them, which the site says makes NFT colors “1,600 times rarer” than Bitcoin and “400 times rarer than Ether.” “. Also, the human eye can only see about 2.3 million colors.
Yep yep. minted by @jailomusic pic.twitter.com/omwmn4Xsuh
— Color Museum (@colordotmuseum) February 3, 2022
Is it legit? After initially announcing the concept, its creator has faced a series of criticisms from people who resented the idea of owning a color. Farooq claims they are based on a “misconception” that the Color Museum is attempting to claim “universal ownership of color” over, say, cerulean, taking legal action against those who use its trademark shades in the future. He says that color owners will only benefit from NFTs sold and purchased through the Color Museum.
“It is the property of a color within a specific context of a digital object in a digital smart contract,” he commented. And he gave as an example the fact that the delivery company UPS was able, after an initial rejection, to register its characteristic part of brown with the US Patent and Trademark Office years ago, ensuring that no other delivery company could use that particular tone.
Critics. To its early detractors, the project continues to represent the worst of the supposedly decentralized, blockchain-powered Web 3.0 concept, in which every concept, even something as central to the human experience as color, can be traded, sold, owned, and speculated on. he. But Color Museum believes it offers hope for a more communal form of capitalism, where profits aren’t hoarded by a few and are distributed more evenly across the web, in this case, to the 10,000 people who own the NFTs.