Any innovation whose name includes the term “fungible” can scarcely be expected to garner much non-geek attention. And yet NFTs have accomplished just that this year.
Many were bewildered by the new tech. The explanations that poured forth offered analogies to, say, certificates of authenticity or baseball cards. But, most literally, an NFT is tradeable code. That code is attached to metadata, such as a name, image or description. Once it is bought, it becomes indelibly registered to your own digital ID. You, in a sense, own the code.
NFTs confuse because they are abstract. But the sums they rack up are very concrete. Across tokenised games, art, tweets and more, buyers poured $27bn into the NFT market in 2021. Digital artist Beeple’s $69m auction of “Everydays: the First 5000 Days” rattled minds in March. The work, a variegated collage of the artist’s other creations, was among the highest-grossing sales for a living artist.