NFTs are commonly associated with digital collectibles.
This perception hides a far more important use case.
Throughout history, major scholarly discoveries — especially those challenging established interpretations — have often struggled to find institutional acceptance. Peer review, funding structures, and academic inertia make it difficult for unconventional findings to survive intact.
Blockchain technology introduces a fundamentally different mechanism.
An NFT can function not as a collectible, but as a fixed scholarly artifact — a timestamped, immutable container that preserves a discovery exactly as it was articulated at the moment of its emergence.
In my work, NFTs are used to record and preserve the first fully decoded and structurally analyzed ancient Egyptian texts, including their linguistic, geometric, and symbolic layers.
These works represent a discovery process comparable in scope to early biblical exegesis — but fixed permanently on-chain, outside institutional distortion.
The artistic form is not decoration.
It is the original encoding medium through which ancient texts were structured and transmitted.
By minting these works as NFTs, three values are unified:
• Scholarly value — the discovery itself
• Documentary value — immutable provenance and authorship
• Artistic value — the historically authentic mode of transmission
This approach does not replace academia.
It safeguards knowledge until academia is ready to engage with it.
NFTs, in this context, are not speculation.
They are archives.
— Nilebann (Andrei Bannikov)
Related works can be viewed in the Nilebann NFT gallery on Foundation:
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