Lucerne Festival NFT collection – FAQ

An NFT or Non-Fungible Token is a digital asset that can be bought, traded, and collected. Each NFT has a digital signature and is thus unique -- i.e., one is not equal to another. This is similar, for example, to paintings and many other assets in the physical world. Their ownership and unique characteristics are registered on and secured by a blockchain.

An important distinction to be made: NFTs are not cryptocurrencies, the main difference being that cryptocurrencies are fungible, i.e., one unit of a given cryptocurrency is equivalent to another.

First of all, you need to log in to the Patron of Art platform. If you haven’t done so yet, you can create an account and either connect your existing (Metamask) wallet, or create a new wallet (through our integration of Fortmatic). Once you are logged into the platform, you can select an asset listed for sale on the platform and view its details. If you decide to purchase the asset, you can do so either with credit card or with cryptocurrency. Once the transaction is confirmed, you will receive the associated NFT on the wallet associated with your account.

A blockchain is a digital ledger of transactions that is duplicated and distributed across the entire network of computer system on the blockchain. It is essentially a system of recording information in a decentralized way that makes it almost impossible to change, hack or cheat the system. The Ethereum Blockchain that we use would at this time require investments of several billion USD to be able to attack individual transactions executed on our platform, hence it is very secure.

Editions are a way to create (or, in industry terms, "mint") a limited supply of NFTs based on the same representation of a given artwork. These NFTs will share the same attributes, such as the artist’s name and year the artwork was created, but are unique by token IDs (and hence edition number). Editions are, therefore, a digital analogue to lithographies.

Patron of Art and its partner institutions strictly control the number of tokens to be issued in each edition.

No, by buying an NFT you are not acquiring any rights to the physical object to which the NFT relates.

Your purchase only gives you ownership of the NFT itself – that is, the certificate of ownership and authenticity, with a unique identification code. This means that your NFT can only be owned by you, the proof of which is built into the NFT, and is easily and publicly verifiable.

While you can sell the NFT itself, you don’t have any commercial rights to the associated image or artwork.

The Patrons Circle is Patron of Arts' members club, reserved to buyers of our most exclusive NFTs. Members of the Patrons Circle are eligible to a range of benefits, including exclusive content, personal invitations, access to exclusive presales, and more.

Yes, you can display the image associated with your NFT for personal use, e.g., in your public (metaverse) gallery, as your social media profile picture, on a screen in your living room, or printed out as a poster.

You can download a high-resolution file of your NFT directly from your gallery on the Patron of Art platform.

NFTs are kept in a so-called cryptographic wallet. If you don’t already have a wallet, we recommend signing up to patron-of-art.com using your email and password. We integrate Fortmatic, a service that creates a wallet for you automatically when you sign up. If you prefer to create a wallet through Metamask , you will need to install the Metamask browser plugin. Once you have done that, you can then sign up for our platform using the "Sign up with Metamask" button. This will connect your account to your existing wallet.

It can take a couple of minutes for the (fiat or crypto) third party payment provider to confirm your payment. Once the transaction is successfully confirmed, it typically only takes a couple more minutes until you see the NFT show up in the Gallery section of your account. It will typically also be visible in your wallet, e.g, in your browser extension or NFT aggregators such as OpenSea.

We currently don’t offer the option to resell NFTs on our platform, but we plan to do so in the future. Until then, if you want to resell your NFT, you can do so on other compatible platforms such as OpenSea.

An important note: certain NFTs that you can purchase on Patron of Art are non-transferrable for regulatory reasons, i.e., you cannot resell them. This is, in particular, the case for NFTs we sell in large editions to raise funds for charity. In such cases, the fact that a given NFT is non-transferrable is clearly indicated on the platform. Once we receive clarity from the regulator and if this is in support of transfers, the affected NFTs will become transferable.

When you purchase a Patron of Art NFT on the primary market (i.e., when you purchase directly from the platform), we transfer 80% of the proceeds, net of third-party payment provider fees (and, if applicable, sales taxes), to the partner authenticating that particular NFT. In the case of our pro-bono campaigns, this share increases to 97%, with 3% of net revenues going to cover part of our operational costs.

As mentioned above, we currently don’t offer the option to resell NFTs on our platform, as we plan to activate the secondary market at a later point of time.  If you decide to sell your NFT on another platform such as OpenSea, Patron of Art and our partners will not be involved in the payment.

We currently mint NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon, two of the most used blockchains for NFTs.

High energy consumption for Ethereum NFTs is an issue of the past. Until 15 September 2022, NFTs created on the Ethereum blockchain consumed a lot of energy. Since Ethereum’s successful transition to "Proof of Stake", a 99.9% less energy-intensive consensus mechanism compared to the previous "Proof of Work", its energy intensity has become comparable to other regular internet-based services like watching videos on YouTube or searching on Google. Ethereum NFTs therefore no longer have an outrageously negative environmental impact.

Yes! As a company, Patron of Art strives to have a net zero environmental impact. We strive to prevent carbon emissions in our technology and calculate, on a yearly basis, the total CO2 emissions caused by our entire operations. We then compensate them through certified programs.