“It’s really incredible art, and I’ve always wanted to sell it, but I just couldn’t get my head around how do you price it, how do you actually sell it,” George Hartley, one of the co-founders of Bluethumb, told Inside Retail about the burgeoning digital art scene.  “NFTs have solved this in a beautiful fashion, where now you can own a piece of [digital] art because there’s a public record on a blockchain that says who controls it, who owns it.” Bluethumb Digital’s first collection, the Genesis Drop, is set to launch this Thursday, February 24, with 91 artworks from 25 Australian digital artists, including big names, such as Marble Mannequin, Mysterious AI, and Brad Robson, who recently got a shoutout from NFT aficionado Paris Hilton.  The collection will initially be available exclusively to crypto users, before opening up to people purchasing by credit card in the coming weeks. Prices listed on the website range from a few hundred to several thousand dollars. Lowering the barriers to entry The launch comes amidst growing demand for NFTs. OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace in the world, facilitated nearly US$3 billion worth of transactions in December 2021, and was recently valued at US$13.3 billion, according to TechCrunch. But if OpenSea is the Amazon of NFTs, Bluethumb Digital aims to be a curated destination for fine art that just so happens to be digital.  “We want to be purely about amazing digital art. We have amazing traders, and we just hired a fantastic person to lead Bluethumb Digital. There’s so much that we can do,” Hartley said.  A key focus for Bluethumb Digital is lowering the barrier to entry to digital art. That means accepting credit card payments alongside crypto transfers, and offering customers a physical version of their digital artwork in addition to an NFT. “I think one of the reasons you have art is to display it and put it in your home. And to me, digital hasn’t solved that display element,” Hartley said. When customers purchase a piece of physical art on Bluethumb, they can choose to have it professionally framed before it is shipped, so it arrives ready to hang. Bluethumb Digital will offer something similar. “We managed to source a framer who can create these beautiful digital frames that are floating in clear plastic, so you can display your NFT, whether it’s an animation or a still image, on your shelf,” he said.  Hartley plans to continue building out Bluethumb Digital’s features and capabilities going forward, with support for more blockchains beyond Ethereum at the top of the list.  “The audience is small but growing, and we’re working to make the barriers to getting started lower, because there are still barriers to get over,” Hartley said.  Supporting artists Beyond catering to digital art buyers, Bluethumb Digital will also enable Australian artists to capture the opportunity around NFTs.  “We have 17,000 artists [on Bluethumb], and hundreds of them do digital art, they just haven’t sold it,” Hartley said. “Now they can, and we certainly anticipate a lot more coming across.” One of the biggest benefits of NFTs for artists is the ability to earn money from a piece of art even after it has been sold. If a customer decides to resell a piece of digital art purchased on Bluethumb Digital, for instance, the artist will get 10 per cent.  “The cool thing about that is if an artist becomes more collectible, or the value of their NFT goes up in the secondary market, they will continue to make royalties and get paid. It’s really important to us to support artists,” he said. Bluethumb Digital is also developing a program that will help traditional artists cross over into the digital world, with a particular focus on supporting Indigenous artists and female artists, who are underrepresented in this space.  “The program will take elements of their work and generate new versions of it and build a whole collection of generative art,” he explained.  The company’s current plan is to drop a new collection of digital art every two months.  While Hartley acknowledges that NFTs come with certain risks – US$1.7 million worth of digital goods was just stolen from OpenSea users in a recent hack – he believes Bluethumb Digital could outpace the company’s original platform for physical art in the long term.  “I do anticipate it could be a very big thing,” he said.