In the wild world of NFTs, you can now own an actual colour

Want to own a colour? Cadbury, Tiffany & Co, and Mattel all do, and now so can you. The NFT boom has seen it all – Banksy burnings, Bored Ape millionaires, trashcan art – but now the Color Museum is offering the chance for us all to own a colour, and make money from the royalties.

The new NFT marketplace, called the Color Museum, is selling 10,000 sRGB (standard red, green, blue) hues and offering each ‘minter’ ownership of the colour.  Whenever an NFT is sold on the marketplace using the same colour hue, the owner earns a percentage of the sale. If this sounds crazy, then catch up on the latest NFT trends and you'll see anything is possible with NFTs.

A great part of the Color Museum idea is the ability to name your colour hue. You assign it a personality and give it a description. Naturally this has led to some early adopters having fun with their colour identities – cherry red 'BOOB1E' anyone?

“We’re going to be turning colours into money,” bragged Omar Farooq, the marketplace's founder, when interviewed by Motherboard. He then explains that if an NFT is sold on the Color Museum marketplace using a shade not yet owned, whoever comes closest “by Euclidean distance” on the sRGB scale earns the royalties.

The Color Museum's site offers an example of its 'profit pool' idea. If Bored Ape 9245 sells for $769,965 / £568,033, the owner of the predominant colour (a mustard) would earn $6,288 / £4,638. Owners of every other colour hue in the painting will also earn from their NFT based on the percentage of their colour in the art.

There are caveats to this colour owning NFT, predominantly you only earn from NFTs sold on the Color Museum's own marketplace. Also, with 16.7 million available in the sRGB range and only 10,000 NFTs up for grabs the chances of always earning from a sold NFT are super rare.

If this sounds like pot luck then read up on some amazing uses of colour by some top brands. Or catch up on colour theory with our jargon-free guide to everything you need to know. It may help.

Read more:

• What are NFTs? Here's all you need to know
• NFT crypto: which is best for your art?
• How to make and sell an NFT