The word “non-fungible token (NFT) ” refers to a token that is not fungible.
In economics, a fungible asset is anything that has easily interchangeable units, such as currency.
This is unlikely if anything is non-fungible, which means it has special properties that prohibit it from being interchanged with something else. It may be a home or a one-of-a-kind painting, such as the Mona Lisa. You may photograph the painting or purchase a print, but there will still be only one original painting.
In the digital world, NFTs are “one-of-a-kind” properties that can be purchased and sold like any other piece of property, but they have no physical structure. The digital tokens can be compared to ownership certificates for virtual or physical properties.
How do they work? Paintings and other typical works of art are valuable because they are one-of-a-kind.
Digital archives, on the other hand, can be quickly and indefinitely duplicated.
Artwork can be “tokenized” with NFTs to establish a digital certificate of ownership that can be purchased and sold. A record of who owns what, similar to crypto-currency, is held on a public ledger known as the blockchain.
Since the ledger is maintained by thousands of machines worldwide, the documents cannot be forged.
There is nothing stopping people from copying digital art. Beeple’s painting, which sold for $69 million, has been seen by millions of people, and the image has been replicated and shared numerous times.
In certain cases, the artist keeps copyright control of their work, allowing them to continue producing and selling copies.
However, the purchaser of the NFT receives a “token” proving ownership of the “original” job.
It’s been compared to purchasing an autographed print by some.
NFTs may also provide smart contracts that, for example, offer the artist a share of any potential token sales.
Are NFTs worth anything? Anybody can tokenize their work and market it as an NFT, but recent reports of multi-million-dollar transactions have piqued interest.
Nyan Pet, a 2011 meme of a flying pop-tart/cat, sold for more than $500,000. Grimes sold some of her digital art for more than $6 million a few weeks later.
Art isn’t the only thing that is tokenized and marketed. With bids reaching $2.5 million, Twitter creator Jack Dorsey has sponsored an NFT of the first-ever tweet.
Christie’s selling of a digital artist Beeple’s NFT for $69 million (£50 million) set a new high for digital art.
However, as with crypto-currencies, there are questions regarding the blockchain’s environmental effect.
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