Hey everybody, 
I recently created my first NFT (nonfungible token) and as I was going through the process of doing that I was struck by both the opportunities and potential of NFTs and by their relatively limited adoption and use currently. I hesitated for a while before taking the plunge, my suspicion that if it makes sense it won't catch on making me wary of NFTs. I suspect that I'm not the only one out there giving it the old wait'n'see.
This brings me around to the point of all this, the harebrained idea mentioned earlier. Until I come up with a better name I'm calling it the Hive Art Contest and basically what it is is a weekly post/contest that highlights artists here on the blockchain and gives away NFTs as prizes. I'm still fleshing out structure, rules, and guiding principles (and welcome suggestions from those of you that have actually run something like this before, I haven't). My thinking was that people are more inclined to spare an upvote than part with their hard earned HIVE, so I am going to use the liquid rewards from each post to purchase NFTs for the next round of the contest.
One of my goals is to normalize and encourage the creation and trading of NFTs as well as the collecting and holding of them. This would not only help content creators such as myself but would also serve to make hive better as well. I am by no means an expert on NFTs, just enthusiastic about them and their potential. To me they represent an alternative means to support favorite content creators, especially for those of us with upvotes that don't amount to much, as well as a new way to approach collecting and displaying art.
I feel like a contest could do well to draw in those who might otherwise not be especially interested or involved in either art or NFTs as well as being a useful tool for increasing awareness and understanding of both here on hive. My hope is that with increased awareness and usage comes increased retention, both of creators and consumers of content.
I hope I'm not going about this the wrong way like these guys but we shall see. For the first round I have already transferred one of my NFTs to this account to give away (I will be doing a separate post for the contest) but after that I will not feature any of my own work in the contest. I expect that it may take a bit for this to get to the point that it is self supporting, I intend to subsidize it as best I can until that point but if there are others out there who are interested in getting involved I would not be opposed to that either.
I love the variety of curation trails out there supporting all the lovely stuff here on hive but why restrict ourselves to just upvotes? While the contest is the only thing in the pipeline currently I'm sure other wild ideas will come to me eventually. I aim to use this account to promote the arts on here more generally (I still have to figure out how best to utilize the nonliquid rewards) so stay tuned. If you have a harebrained idea of your own that might help with that, drop me a comment, who knows what wild scheme we might be able to concoct!
Until then, hive on!