Budding NFT marketplace, AriSwap has joined the Africa Blockchain University as the platform provider for the upcoming NFT Workshops for the African Artists series. The project is built on the carbon zero blockchain, Celo and aims at prosperity for all through NFT education.
AriSwaps is marketed as a project creating room for all creatives to be part of the growing NFT market because it allows the tokenization of physical art on top of providing a marketplace for storage and transfer of digital assets all from a mobile device.
AriSwap hopes to enhance NFT education in Africa by funding workshops and making its ecosystem available for artists to experiment with minting artistic works.
The platform’s ecosystem highlights its key features including a secure marketplace to safeguard user assets allowing them to easily transact at significantly lower fees in an environment with an outstanding user-friendly interface for an enhanced experience.
In the current space, a young artist looking to enter the NFT world has to pay up to $200 to mint a piece that they are not even guaranteed to sell. AriSwap looks to change this by allowing creatives to make their pieces for just $0.001 (about 4UGX).
While NFTs from inception have primarily focused on digital artists, AriSwap intends to include traditional artists and collectors through the tokenization of their physical art on its platform to usher these artists into the digital Web3 world.
For tokenization, all one needs to do is create a ‘digital twin’ of their physical art by taking a photo of the piece and uploading this to the AriSwap platform for minting. A digital certificate is then issued and when someone buys the digital image, the physical art is shipped to the buyer.
Because most African artists have yet to transition into digital art, this unique tokenization feature will be a key selling point at the training workshops with the Africa Blockchain University (ABU). These artists are now given a new space from which to earn from their intellectual property.
The NFT training workshops have been running since October 2021 as the ABU NFT Afrika initiative to give artists the skills needed to bring their creative communities into the NFT space. The goal here is to help artists understand how to preserve African culture and heritage while sustainably accessing international markets.
According to the ABU statement, the workshops offer knowledge about the Blockchain, fundamentals of NFTs, Building Communities, Branding, Storytelling, How To Organise NFT Collections, and Tools to Begin an NFT Journey.
“Our participants learn how to mint, invest in DeFi, and cash out their Crypto to local currencies on p2p exchanges like Paxful. We intend to expose African artists to comprehending financial sovereignty in a period where you don’t need to trust but verify,” the statement highlighted.
AriSwap CEO, Alex Rodriguez has personally run virtual presentations to artists in Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Ghana aimed at giving Africans the tools to climb out of the poverty trap that many artists find themselves stuck in.
This weekend on May 28th, the workshop will be in Nigeria to teach communities how to get started and tell their stories through NFTs with registration open here. Subsequent sessions will follow in Liberia, Kenya, Gambia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, South Africa, Egypt, South Sudan, and Botswana.
Through NFT educational outreach and networking, AriSwap and the Africa Blockchain University are enthusiastic that they can enable African artists to sustainably protect their work while still earning a profit.