Animator and video producer Justin Roiland will soon release a lineup of non-fungible token (NFT) art, digital art platform Nifty Gateway said in a tweet this morning.

“We are thrilled to welcome Justin Roiland to Nifty Gateway for his first-ever crypto art release. The full collection features several original artworks from Justin and will go live next Tuesday, January 19,” the platform said.

Best known for his work with the animated series Rick and Morty, the move marked Roiland’s first-ever foray into the burgeoning NFT art market—one that gained prominence in the past year with a niche audience that’s willing to shell out big amounts on crypto art.

"2020 was a huge year for NFTs, most notably the Crypto Art category which seems to have found product-market fit quicker than any other with over $20M of artworks sold. This is perhaps attributable to the clear value propositions to both collectors and creators, whilst scalability constraints might be less of a concern as art isn’t moved around on-chain as much," Piers Kicks, head of gaming at Delphi Digital, told Decrypt.

Nifty Gateway, owned by crypto exchange Gemini, is one of the bigger players in the NFT art niche. Several million dollars' worth of NFT art have gone under the hammer on Nifty Gateway in 2021 alone, with one such artwork selling for over $373,000 last week.

As such, NFTs are not limited to art. They are smart contracts that contain identifiable information about a product, service, in-game assets, cartoon kitties, or just about anything that they can verifiably back. This means that whoever holds the private key to an NFT is the rightful owner of that NFT—eliminating the chance of fraud or creative theft.

How NFTs Blew Up in 2020

2020 brought with it many, many things, both bad and good. And while Bitcoin's bull run and the summer of DeFi grabbed the headlines, a quiet revolution was taking place in another corner of crypto: the world of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs have been around for a few years now, powering crypto collectibles like CryptoKitties—but they're little more than a proof of concept for the unique, non-replicable cryptocurrency tokens. This summer, NFTs came of age in the wake of the decentralized fin...

The sector’s growth has allowed artists from all backgrounds to profit off their creations regardless of their background. But it has opened the gates to a world of weird too, with some creators even managing to sell their tokenized selfies. Because why not?

Update: This article has been updated with comments from Piers Kicks.