“We’re at the beginning of a digital Renaissance”
Since MORROW collective became Publishers on Nifty Gateway, we’ve curated a bunch of drops with our artists and we are excited to be collaborating with the platform for Art Dubai Digital 2023. Here, we had a chat with Matthew Ferrick, Creative Lead at Nifty Gateway, to give us some insight into what makes NG tick.
Q: Tell us about the start of Nifty Gateway and the driving forces behind it?
A: Nifty Gateway was founded by Duncan and Griffin Cock Foster in 2018, and acquired by Gemini in 2019, with the belief that crypto networks and blockchains have the power to fundamentally change the art world by creating greater choice, independence, and opportunity for artists, creators, and collectors.
Q: What do you believe is the power of blockchain?
A: Immutable, forever provenance.
Q: How much of your strategy is to onboard new collectors and to ease entry into the NFT market?
A: Our mission when we started is the same now: Onboard a billion people to NFTs.
Q: What is your main market differentiation?
A: In addition to the history of record setting and still extremely sought after past releases, compared to other marketplaces, NG has always focused on making it as easy as possible for artists and collectors alike to release and collect.
Q: How quickly do you think the traditional art market collector-base will adopt NFTS?
A: Cryptoart was born out of collaboration. It all started with artists collaborating with code, but the marketplaces and platforms that emerged shortly after can be viewed as another type of collaborator working together mainly with artists, but also larger partners like legacy art houses and external curators. NG has had the pleasure of collaborating with a multitude of amazing artists like Pak, Fewocious, Coldie, Sarah Zucker, Skygolpe, XCOPY, Hackatao, Trevor Jones, Bryan Brinkman — far too many to list to be honest — and other partners like Sotheby’s and Bonhams. We’ve continued to pioneer that spirit of collaboration with the Publishers platform that renowned external curators such as 33, MORROW collective, iv gallery, Fakewhale, Superchief and many others are using to release curated collections of their own.
Q: What’s in the pipeline for NG?
A: Heading into 2023 NG is focused on five thematic areas: 1) Continuing to raise the bar on the quality of releases; 2) NFT preservation-focused metadata re-architecting; 3) Prioritizing artist retention + Career Development; 4) Re-imagining the user experience of NFT collectors; 5) Leveraging our enterprise opportunities (e.g. Starbucks) as a tool for greater ecosystem growth
Q: What do you see as the future of digital art?
A: We’re at the beginning of a digital Renaissance. New future greats are starting to create, share and mint their art every day. An explosion of creativity and mind-bending experimentation is coming our way. We’re getting ready for on-chain art, multi-blockchain art, programmable art and much more.
