10070006Becoming Digital - Onboarding Local Artist Projects to the BlockchainClosedCollaborative R&DInnovate UKIn 2018 we established a community benefit society for creatives in Liverpool with experience of creating digital content for artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers that collectively created a digital platform for Smithdown Social Arts Hub that sought innovative and digital opportunities to generate income for artists. As early adopters of cryptocurrency, we were interested in the rapid rise in the use of blockchain technology, particularly non-fungible tokens (NFTs), that assigned smart contracts to digital artwork which gave artists more control over the sale, partners, commissions, and future sales of their work. This discovery led to a survey of the over 60 local traditional and digital artists we had exhibited at Gallery 455 since June 2021 and realised none had generated an NFT and had no understanding of the onboarding process. Our project will demystify the use of NFTs for a group of local artists through an educational process that will provide detailed NFT and blockchain technology education, onboard artists onto the blockchain through creating individual cryptocurrency wallets, and help them to create and mint a series of NFTs onto the world's largest NFT marketplace, Opensea, in order to trial the benefits of NFTs for local artists.