Geotagged NFTs combine 3D representations of real-world art with the geographic meta-data that identifies the location of the art. For example, a geotagged NFT of a painting in Germany would have the longitude and latitude data attached to the code of a digital version of the painting. This digital version is then represented as a token on a blockchain platform and can be sold or traded.

This form of speculative asset trading takes advantage of the safety of blockchain technology while offering artists a commission on the trading of their art.

Advantages

The trading of Geotagged NFTs offers many advantages over traditional art trade platforms. The digital nature of geotagged NFTs offers ease of access for traders while simultaneously removing the need to physically move the art from location to location.

Geotagged NFTs can be traded on an international trading platform. While reducing overhead cost and security risks associated with traditional art trading. For street art and for a graffiti artist in particular the physical position of the art is integral to both the artistic expression and its physical safety, as moving the physical art piece may simply not be an option.

Origin

A Latvian street artist by the name of Kiwie pioneered the concept of geotagging street art and selling this artwork as an NFT. NFTs or ‘Non-fungible Tokens’ use blockchain technology such as Ethereum as the public ledger of ownership of a piece of digital art. Effectively tokenizing the artwork and allowing it to be traded as a blockchain asset. Geotagged NFTs additionally integrate real-world spatial data into the tokenized digital art piece.

Kiwie’s geotagged NFTs for example have even further adaptations that disrupt more traditional forms of art trading. Given the nature of street art, the physical artwork may be covered up or destroyed. In this case, Kiwie’s character ‘Fat Monster’, will automatically turn into ‘Ghost Monster’ gaining a halo and becoming translucent.

This change of the monster character to a ‘Ghost Monster’ does not change the owned digital token, but adds a temporal nature to the art while maintaining its tradable ownership.