One Thing: April 2021

I had a very singular focus on the digital art world this month. I've noticed that as NFT's have reached the mainstream, there have been a lot of criticisms hurled at it, and for some good reasons! There is a ton of noise in the space, from celebrities doing the bare minimum to make some quick money^[1] to uninteresting copycat projects with token holders begging for a retweet in the mentions of any Twitter account with a CryptoPunk. But in my eyes, Ethereum has proved to be an incredible vector for ingenuity and creativity, which has made sifting through the noise well worth it. With that said, here's my one big thing for the month.

This is a Robbery and The Future of Art Theft

I love a good art heist. It's an easy type of crime to be hypocritical about. I don't necessarily want famous works of art to get stolen because the public should have access to as many cultural heritage artifacts as possible. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't get enjoyment out of reading about it after the fact. Famous art is a bizarre thing to steal because it's difficult for thieves to extract much value out of it. Nobody could cut Botticellis "Primavera" out of its frame in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and expect to sell it for anything near its worth. It's far too famous. It's not like robbing a bank and stealing cash; a painting on a canvas is non-fungible!

This month I watched the documentary "This is a Robbery," which is about the theft of 13 works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990. This immediately got me thinking about what blockchain-based art crimes might look like. Last month, Beeple's "First 5000 Days" sold for 69 million USD, and like any expensive work of art, it has to be protected! Since it's digital, at first glance, it's not necessarily the type of asset that warrants motion sensors and laser beams to protect it. Yet, there is a physical object that needs to be secure to keep the art safe, and that's the wallet that owns the art. If I bought a Cryptopunk from a MetaMask wallet, my computer would now potentially be worth tens of thousands of dollars at a bare minimum^[2]. If an art thief got access to my computer, all they would have to do is transfer the token to an address they controlled, and the heist is complete—no cutting canvas out of frames, no lifting items off pressure plates ala Indiana Jones, no fun.

Now, this got me thinking, if an art thief was able to transfer a highly valuable NFT to a wallet they controlled via "traditional" means like through social engineering or physically stealing the wallet, would it still have utility? Since the token is on a blockchain, everyone could still see it, but the original owner would not control its fate. It's kind of like if someone stole the Mona Lisa and replaced it with a tv screen that displayed a live feed of its new home in an undisclosed location. The token could theoretically move around the blockchain in black market deals. Still, anyone who comes into possession of it would be vulnerable to someone linking a wallet to their physical person. There's always a paper trail on the blockchain, and that presents the biggest problem. Would anyone feel confident enough to own a wallet with a "stolen" valuable NFT if every move they make afterward is exposed? Would it be more beneficial to move the stolen NFT to a hardware wallet and then use the hardware wallet as a medium of exchange? That would prevent the blockchain paper trail problem, but the question remains whether or not the NFT remains valuable. Are there criminal organizations that would accept Into The Ether as payment for ~50 ETH worth of AK-47s and cocaine if the token was "radioactive"^[3]?

At this point, I think I've talked myself into thinking that there may be limited criminal utility in stealing an NFT. But I think it would be fascinating if someone does. I bet there's a certain allure to viewing and appreciating a stolen work of art while it is literally in a state of "being stolen." For the first time in history, the Museum of Stolen Art (MOSA) is a thing that could reasonably exist if there are enough high-profile thefts. I'm not exactly rooting for it, but the story would be incredibly compelling.