Nothing like a barrage of blockchain news to make you wonder, “Um… what’s going on here?”
That’s how I felt when I read about Grimes getting paid millions of dollars for NFTs, or Nyan Cat being sold as one.
By the time we all figured out what was going on, Twitter’s founder had put an autographed tweet up for sale as an NFT.
We’re still reading news about individuals spending house money for rock clip art months after we first published this explainer, and my mother has no idea what an NFT is.
You might be thinking, what exactly is an NFT?
I believe I’ve figured it out after countless hours of reading.
I’m also expecting to cry.
Let’s start at the beginning:
What is a non-financial transaction (NFT)?
What does the acronym NFT stand for?
It Stands for Non-Fungible-Token!, i know that doesn’t help things much.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
“Non-fungible” basically indicates it’s one-of-a-kind and can’t be substituted with anything else.
A bitcoin, for example, is fungible, meaning you can exchange one for another and get precisely the identical thing.
A one-of-a-kind trade card, on the other hand, cannot be duplicated.
You’d get something altogether different if you swapped it for a different card.
You traded a Squirtle for a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, dubbed “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards” by StadiumTalk. (I’ll take them at their word.)
What are NFTs and how do they work?
Most NFTs are, at a high level, part of the Ethereum blockchain.
Ethereum, like bitcoin and dogecoin, is a cryptocurrency, but its blockchain also enables these NFTs, which store additional information that allows them to function differently from, say, an ETH coin.
It’s worth mentioning that various blockchains can use NFTs in their own ways.
(Some have already done so.)
What should you buy?
NFTs can be anything digital (drawings, music, even your brain being downloaded and transformed into an AI), but the current buzz is focused on exploiting the technology to sell digital art.
Do you mean people paying for my excellent tweets?
I don’t believe anyone will be able to stop you, but that isn’t what I meant.
A lot of the discussion revolves around NFTs as a digital evolution of fine art collecting.
(As a side note, we were attempting to think of something so ridiculous that it wouldn’t be a real thing when we came up with the sentence “purchasing my excellent tweets.”)
So, of course, shortly after we published the report, Twitter’s founder sold one for slightly under $3 million.)
Do people truly believe this will become into a form of art collecting?
I don’t believe anyone will be able to stop you, but that isn’t what I meant.
A lot of the discussion revolves around NFTs as a digital evolution of fine art collecting.
(As a side note, we were attempting to think of something so ridiculous that it wouldn’t be a real thing when we came up with the sentence “purchasing my excellent tweets.”)
So, of course, shortly after we published the report, Twitter’s founder sold one for slightly under $3 million.)
Do people truly believe this will become into a form of art collecting?
I’m sure some individuals sincerely hope so, like the one who paid nearly $390,000 for a 50-second Grimes video or the $6.6 million for a Beeple film.
In fact, one of Beeple’s works was auctioned at Christie’s, the world-famous auction house— Yoink!