When gallery director Nate Frost opened the doors for the first private appointment at ABV Gallery’s Chain Reaction, visitors stepped into a darkened industrial space, the only light in the room emanating from twenty screens spaced evenly along the otherwise blank walls. ABV swapped its usual canvas and acrylic for high-quality digital screens displaying video loops of a new kind of virtual art: non-fungible tokens (commonly known as NFTs).

It’s not often that Atlanta gets a “first” in the art world. But ABV Gallery, a contemporary gallery in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward neighborhood, might be the first physical gallery to host an NFT show.

Superchief, an artist-run gallery with locations in New York, Miami and Los Angeles, made waves as the “world’s first physical NFT gallery” on March 25 with the show Season One Starter Pack in its new Union Square location.Superchief’s claim was quickly picked up by Vulture, Cointelegraph, Business Insider, Hypebeast and even a news outlet in Australia. Business Insider’s headline proclaims, “A NYC gallery just became the first to display crypto art physically.” That’s not entirely accurate. While Superchief is the only non-digital gallery with the express purpose of displaying NFT art, it is not the first gallery to host an NFT exhibit.

ABV Gallery opened Chain Reaction in partnership with digital art platform Nifty Gateway on March 20, or five days before Superchief launched Season One Starter Pack. Neither gallery is the first physical art space to display digital art, though.

So what makes an NFT different from other digital exhibitions?

Dissecting this digital tangle first requires an understanding of non-fungible tokens. A fungible token is a digital asset that’s interchangeable, like bitcoin or another cryptocurrency. In real-world terms, a dollar is exchangeable for another dollar. They have the same value.

Non-fungible means the token is unique. Four copies of the same digital artwork might look identical but, if they are NFTs, they will have unique identifiers in a cryptocurrency blockchain. NFTs indicate digital and sometimes even physical items but are actually strings of code that track ownership and authenticity. Even tweets have sold as NFTs. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for $2.9 million after three months of bidding.

While ABV does not plan to become an all-NFTs-all-the-time gallery like Superchief, Chain Reaction was a round success. All but one of what are essentially fine art gifs (termed “digitally animated cryptoart” by ABV) are sold out, with a top bid of $45 thousand for Victor Mosquera’s Gemini II. It’s no Beeple, but it’s not bad for an art scene that has traditionally flown under the radar.

Frost is interested in hosting a larger NFT show at ABV in the future. He sees the tokens as an opportunity for digital artists to give monetary value to their work. The real lesson of the past year, Frost says, is the importance of “finding better ways to reach people digitally.” NFTs play a part in that.

“Conceptually, I love it,” says Atlanta-based artist and illustrator Amy Ashbaugh of the new medium. “Part of the intimacy of art is that you can own that object,” she says, and NFTs are trying to provide that sense of scarcity and originality for digital art.

Before Ashbaugh creates her own NFT, though, she says cryptomining must drastically reduce its energy consumption. She’s part of a growing cadre of artists who refuse to use NFTs because of their astronomical environmental footprint. Some groups, like Superchief, say they will offset the energy used in minting NFTs. Ethereum, the main cryptocurrency for NFTs, is pursuing a more efficient algorithm.

Coco Conroy, the director of photography gallery Jackson Fine Art, sees NFTs as an attempt to add value and originality to infinitely reproducible art. It is an issue that the photography world has been discussing for the last 20 years — will people continue to buy prints. So far, the answer is yes. Even so, Conroy says collectors will still want something tangible to display in their homes. Especially after the past year, she says, “people have online fatigue.”

Perhaps, with physical screens displaying digital cryptoart, ABV has found that balance.

Originally published at The Comeback.