The minting of NFTs that represent physical and digital art may enable exciting new avenues for artists and art sellers, but it can be difficult to understand and navigate the different platforms and blockchain protocols that enable this, especially for the many artists and art sellers who have no experience with blockchain technology and tokenised assets.
This is where services like BullishArt and MusicArt come in – they offer an easy way to onboard artists and art sellers and get them minting NFTs on the BSV blockchain, with no NFT experience or expertise required. The BSV blockchain offers the best platform on which to mint and use NFTs, thanks to its low transaction fees, high data throughput and support for complex smart contracts and file storage.
Whereas NFTs minted on Ethereum mostly consist of a URL embedded in smart contract, which in turn points to a centralised server or cloud platform like AWS that could store anything at that address, NFTs minted on the BSV blockchain are stored on the blockchain itself, meaning they are immutable and are not subject to the closure or compromise of centralised servers.
This is made possible thanks to the BSV blockchain’s low transaction fees and unbounded scaling. Larger block sizes (up to 4GB at the time of writing) and transaction fees at a fraction of a US cent mean that storing a high-quality digital file on the digital ledger is cheap and easy.
For those literate in the NFT minting process and blockchain data storage, the BSV blockchain’s technical capabilities make the platform an easy choice for minting. For those without deep technical knowledge, however, it often comes down to ease of use and support.
Shea Winter Roggio, Founder of Winter Museo, chooses to mint artwork NFTs on the BSV blockchain because of its low transaction fees and the support he sees for innovation and the creation of utility within the ecosystem.
Winter Museo is an online store for artwork, offering everything from fine art prints to city map posters. The store accepts standard credit card payments and has recently added support for BSV payments through – a plug-and-play cryptocurrency payment solution for businesses that supports BSV.
We spoke to Roggio about why he chose to add support for BSV payments and to mint NFTs on the BSV blockchain.
Why the BSV blockchain
After he had spent some time selling artwork in Dubai, Roggio started Winter Museo as a store to help people decorate their homes, a sector that became even more pertinent after the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic.
‘I decided that I wanted to build an e-commerce portal where people could reinvent their environments, both home and office living spaces; my motto was empty walls need love.’
‘I’m trying to build a synergy between the massive amount of people who shop online for generic posters and for the very limited amount of people who buy fine art prints,’ he says.
Roggio’s introduction to the BSV blockchain was made through his friend Francesco Morello, Founder of artwork NFT gallery and marketplace BullishArt. Roggio attended the CoinGeek New York 2021 Conference in Morello’s stead and instantly warmed to the BSV ecosystem.
‘When Francesco was invited to speak in New York, he wasn’t able to make it, and he asked me if I could go on his behalf. So, I went up for those four days and I just felt this incredible synergy at the actual conference; it felt like there was a level of clarity and forthcoming knowledge being shared amongst peers and colleagues,’ he says.
‘There’s this sincerity, this feeling of honesty and an openness to talk to anybody about anything.
After attending the conference in New York, Roggio began to look selling physical fine art prints online and simultaneously deliver the NFTs of those prints to customers.
‘I wanted to align myself with the BSV ecosystem because I believe it’s going to be a huge part of our future and I wanted to stand out from competitors of mine,’ he says.
‘I was originally looking into the Ethereum platforms and the exorbitant fees involved in minting on there, and I was looking for more affordable ways to mint as I was just starting out. The shift for me was understanding through trial and error that the cost of minting on Ethereum would be outrageous and noticing that there is this really cool thing happening on RelayX and BSV.’
RelayX is a popular NFT marketplace on the BSV blockchain which is used by many services, including BullishArt, to facilitate the exchange of NFTs.
‘I sell posters on RelayX and then I also have an agreement with BullishArt where we will give them one collection and they will handle the minting, publicity and collecting.’
Roggio notes that the service provided by BullishArt makes it much easier for artists and art sellers to mint and list their NFTs in its online gallery, and the commission charged by the platform is substantially less than traditional galleries.
Adding BSV payments through AnyPay
After he started minting NFTs on the BSV blockchain through BullishArt and RelayX, Roggio decided to integrate AnyPay payments directly onto the Winter Museo store.
‘Installing AnyPay is as simple as it gets. The actual integration of the plugin was incredibly simple – it literally required me creating an account, adding my BSV wallet and that was it. HandCash worked incredibly, and it was immediate,’ Roggio says.
‘Directly on the company website, wintermuseo.com, a user is able to select any posters they would like or if they wanted a fine art print, add them to their carts and check out with AnyPay.’
The payments are instant, and the process for setting them up was simple and straightforward, especially when compared with adding support for traditional card payments.
‘When I set up Winter Museo, I had to get my payment gateway in the United States. This is complicated because you must have a business banking account and business banks only accept certain payment gateways – every bank has their preferred in-house payment gateway, whoever they’ve partnered with. If you want to go outside of that, you’re in for a list of headaches,’ he says.
‘We spent two to three weeks trying to integrate this payment gateway to accept Visa, MasterCard and American Express.’
‘If a business decides today that they want to accept BSV, it’s less than a 24-hour process to integrate AnyPay into your checkout, no matter what system you’re using,’ he adds.
Roggio is excited about the potential for NFTs, not only for the success and growth of his online art store, but also for the utility it gives artists globally.
‘One of the reasons I’m so excited about NFTs is they give artists all over the world without any prejudice the opportunity to make money,’ he says.
‘If you want to exhibit in New York City, you’ve got to meet a list of criteria that is through the roof. For 99.999% percent of people who are artists, you just don’t have that chance. NFTs have created this incredibly fair level playing ground, almost even more advantageous to younger artists, less established, more hungry artists, who can literally create work and showcase it anywhere they want.’
‘You can take somebody in any obscure part of the world, assuming they have an internet connection, and you’ve now given an artist a viable way to make money.’
Browse the full collection of Winter Museo’s fine art prints, posters and more on the store’s official website. To buy items using BSV, simply select the AnyPay payment option at checkout.