Introducing Wakanda One Art Market
By: Hanson A.
Tags: Nft, Nft Marketplace, Nft Collectibles, Nftart, Art

Hello and welcome to the the start of a new NFT marketplace, focused on promoting art of African origin. In a series of articles, we will take you through our journey.

The idea for such a marketplace started over 2.5 years ago and though it was ahead of it’s time

African centred NFT marketplaces have started during 2021 but have not taken off. Though certainly, individual artists have been successful, there is no successful NFT marketplace for African origin art. For the purposes of this article, we will define “successful” as growing it’s active user base daily.

This article doesn’t attempt to examine the cause of failure but really examine the challenges of the market in general and how Wakanda One Art Market will attempt to overcome them. We will be referring mainly to visual art, since music, sculpture and other forms require different analysis

We’ve identified 5 main challenges

1. Art valuation

In many African countries, art is functional, religious/spiritual and/or decorative. Art is not promoted as a main source of income though there are many successful African artists in the world, they are a minority on a continent of over 1.2 billion people, which should be producing more artists. Thus, art is not appreciated as much as in countries with cultures that have developed to include visual art as a pleasurable part of culture.

This is by far the biggest and most pervasive challenge and one that will take the longest to fully overcome but certainly not too long for the next generation of art lovers.

Wakanda One is fully committed to educational programmes promoting digital art creation — something that is easy to promote to younger, tech savvier artists, as well as children

Talent can be harnessed at any age. This is something that we will be promoting more of during 2022

2. Number of artists in the space

This is very much linked to the point above, but it is different. The number of artists reflects the depth of the community and indirectly the potential growth of the community. Too few artists and they won’t be able to inspire enough new artists to join.

By nourishing and educating potential new artists, we hope to grow the artist community here in Ghana and all-around Africa

In an article from earlier this year, QZ business online magazine, tackled the subject of NFT art of African origin. They noted :

“Only a handful of people from Africa have ventured into this territory. Eliud Kipchoge, the Kenyan marathon world record-holder, recently sold NFTs for video highlights of his career for $50,000. In March of this year, Jacon Osinachi, a Nigerian artist, sold $75,000 worth of crypto art over a ten-day period.”

3. Access to technology

The third challenge to entering the NFT Art scene and marketplace is the clear disadvantage artists in Africa have when creating such art. Access to software and hardware to produce art that is visually complex, to stand out, is limited compared to most of the developed North Western and North Eastern artists’ access

The complexity of a piece is not reflective of it’s value or recognition, however, when creating digital visual art, computers have aided humans to create art that pushes the boundaries of what we even imagine visual art to be. That, in itself is a goal of visual art, however, the tech and budget constraints, prohibit most artists on the continent from exploring those boundaries

An NFT can be minted easily online but currently we are seeing highly complex pieces, fetch large amounts — most recently and very visionary piece by Beeple called Human One, which is a hardware and software masterpiece as well as an artistically powerful vision.

But the software and hardware complexities of such a piece are beyond the time and budget of most artists in the developed world, and far beyond any other artists.

I’ve picked that example because it is well known and the advancements in it are easy to identify, even to the most non-technical reader, but there are hundreds of thousands more on the spectrum between the pinnacle of the technology and the basic static image.

To tackle this challenge, we intend to re-invest part of the profits into a production company to help produce more complex pieces, augmented reality, cross-platform collaborations, and any other technically challenging projects.

4. Community support

Though this is a challenge for many projects around the world, that want to have a global reach, we see it as a particular challenge in the African art NFT community. The challenge is caused by and linked to the three challenges above. Thus, we hope that when tackling those challenges, we can also conquer the challenge of having a supportive community that would contribute to the success of the project. This is a core challenge to the ultimate success of the project.

We have seen examples of this in recent community based DAO’s and especially NFT PFP projects — the success of which are closely related to the strength and depth of their communities — technically, financially as well as in terms of marketing power.

5. Global recognition

The final challenge we have identified is one that relates to the individual artists, not the project itself. The recognition of each artist, globally, is the goal of the project. In order to overcome that challenge we need to have strong community support, exceptional marketing and collaborations globally, as well as the vision to see beyond what we are and can do now.

All projects have this challenge, but it is especially a problem for African artists, due in no small part to the legacy of colonialism, current global anti-Black racism, and neo-colonial restrictions.

This challenge is one that must also be overcome by the artists themselves, through vision and the ability to convey powerful art that can break through those barriers and overcome any peripheral limitations. Even limitations of time and space. We endeavour to support them.

Though this project was conceived over three years ago, in the earliest stages of the NFT art movement, it has taken some time to come to fruition. In the meantime, we have seen the rapid evolution of NFT art. NFT’s have added dimensions and capabilities to art that could hardly be conceived just 5 years ago. We hope to also push the boundaries of what is possible in the space and what is expected from our beloved continent of Africa.

We will explore the technical aspects of deployment in our next article as we share with you our journey.