Print Visualizations at Data Stories 2024

Backboned CryptoArt Graph

Author: Milán Janosov & Albert-László Barabási

NFT s, non-fungible tokens, are part of the blockchain technologies, that certify digital assets and their uniqueness, mapping products present in the online space into interchangeable and trackable entities. A major, currently trending branch of NFTs is contemporary artworks. In the past few months, these artworks as NFTs started to build up a booming and rapidly growing market with sales prices up to USD 60m per piece. In this project, we mapped out a segment of the global NFT ecosystem covering 15k artworks and 21k transactions by the end of March 2021: the exclusive trading portal called SuperRare.

The backboned co-ownership network of SuperRare represents artworks and nodes, while there is a connection between two artworks if those two pieces shared at least three owners throughout their history. This backbone-filtered network, therefore, contains a selected set of strong ties, altogether 12,213 links and 9,477 nodes. The central component of 819 works captures intense trading activities focusing on a small subset of the SuperRare art. Theis central cluster coexists with a handful of cliques shown at the periphery, corresponding to small groups of artworks traded together. Node size corresponds to the value of the last sale of the work.