The fervor for Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) attracted countless creators, leading to a Big Bang of digital assets driven by latent or explicit forms of inspiration, as in many creative processes. This work exploits Vision Transformers and graph-based modeling to delve into visual inspiration phenomena between NFTs over the years. Our goals include unveiling the main structural traits that shape visual inspiration networks, exploring the interrelation between visual inspiration and asset performances, investigating crypto influence on inspiration processes, and explaining the inspiration relationships among NFTs. Our findings unveil how the pervasiveness of inspiration led to a temporary saturation of the visual feature space, the impact of the dichotomy between inspiring and inspired NFTs on their financial performance, and an intrinsic self-regulatory mechanism between markets and inspiration waves. Our work can serve as a starting point for gaining a broader view of the evolution of Web3.

翻译：非同质化代币（NFT）的热潮吸引了无数创作者，如同许多创意过程一样，在潜在或显性的灵感驱动下，引发了数字资产的"大爆炸"。本研究利用视觉Transformer与基于图的建模，深入探究多年来NFT之间的视觉灵感现象。我们的目标包括：揭示构成视觉灵感网络的主要结构特征，探索视觉灵感与资产绩效间的相互关系，研究加密货币对灵感过程的影响，并阐释NFT之间的灵感关联。研究发现揭示了灵感的普遍性如何导致视觉特征空间暂时饱和、启发型与被启发型NFT之间的二元性对其财务表现的影响，以及市场与灵感浪潮之间内在的自我调节机制。本工作可作为更全面理解Web3演进的起点。