Pop culture icon Madonna and the digital artist Beeple announced a three-video NFT collaboration today featuring a naked, CGI Madonna giving birth. It’s called “Mother of Creation.”
Madonna—whose current Twitter profile picture is her Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT—shared in a video with Beeple that the pair began collaborating on her first-ever NFTs a year ago.
“We set out to create something that is absolutely and utterly connected to the idea of creation and motherhood,” Madonna said of her NFTs, which are unique blockchain tokens that prove ownership of an asset, in this case a video.
INSANELY HONORED to have collaborated with @Madonna on this project. Excited for the world to see this one… 🙏🙏🙏 https://t.co/Tt2g0O1bqm
While the Madonna x Beeple NFT videos might seem, at first, bizarrely erotic, Madonna explained that the art, which will be auctioned on SuperRare Wednesday, has a pretty straightforward meaning.
“The opening of each video is essentially me giving birth,” she added. “I’m doing what women have been doing since the beginning of time, which is giving birth. But on a more existential level, I’m giving birth to art, and creativity, and we would be lost without both.”
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Infura co-founder and general manager E.G. Galano talks to Decrypt's Kate Irwin about what Infura does, how the Bored Ape Yacht Club could have avoided the hiccups with its Otherdeed NFT mint, other hot NFT collections like Moonbirds, and Ethereum's gas fee issues.
Notably, Beeple recently said in an interview with Decrypt that the next era of NFTs will focus on “emotional connection and utility” rather than on “rampant speculation.”
Beeple’s NFTs with Madonna touch upon emotional connection—to oneself, to nature, and to technology.
A still from Madonna's NFT collection.
“Mother of Nature,” one of the NFTs, carries plenty of emotional weight through its audio. But in classic Beeple fashion, the visuals are surreal and disturbing. The result is a contrast between the softness of the female form and stark sterility of a research laboratory.
“Mother of Evolution” shows how even in times of chaos, or apocalypse, rebirth can still occur, while “Mother of Technology” offers a darker take on humanity’s relationship with technology.
While NFT market activity has at times appeared to be uncoupled from crypto prices—particularly when NFTs have surged as the crypto market declined—that’s not the case right now. With crypto prices in the red nearly across the board this week, the prices for top NFT collections are likewise falling fast.
The floor price—the cheapest available NFT listed on a marketplace—for many of the most valuable NFT projects has fallen by 20% or more in terms of U.S. dollars over the past 24 hours. Even when...
According to the project’s website, the NFTs’ proceeds will be donated to three charities—The Voices of Children Foundation, The City of Joy, and Black Mama’s Bail Out—focused on, respectively, helping Ukrainian children, female survivors of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and incarcerated black women.
Crypto platform MoonPay also will be donating $300,000 as a part of the NFT launch—$100,000 to each charity.
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Bybit is pulling the plug on its NFT marketplace, the latest in a string of crypto firms abandoning the once-hyped digital asset sector, as the exchange continues to grapple with the fallout from a hack five weeks ago.
The crypto exchange said in an April 1 statement that it will discontinue operations for its NFT Marketplace, Inscription Marketplace, and IDO product pages as part of a broader effort to streamline its offerings.
The platform will become inaccessible on April 8, and users have b...
Although some collectors have left NFTs for dead, Canary Capital believes the asset class could find fans on Wall Street.
In a recent interview with Decrypt, Canary Capital CEO Steven McClurg suggested the NFT market could soon experience a revival, with chatter about funds tracking NFT prices potentially stoking investor interest in digital art collectibles.
Although an NFT-backed ETF might have been unthinkable a few years ago, the likelihood that such a fund could become available to U.S. i...
Ethereum NFT marketplace X2Y2 is shutting down its trading platform at the end of April, the firm announced Monday, as the development team pivots to the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and crypto.
X2Y2’s smart contracts will persist, so trades can still be executed, but users will not be able to use the website’s front-end after April 30.
“I know this might sting, especially when it comes to token price. X2Y2 tokens were tied to this NFT vision, and as we close this chapter, that...
