“I don’t find NFTs enticing as a platform for releasing art on,” says v buckenham, a London-based digital artist who ought to be the target market for the systems. Chiefly, for many: why? What is the actual point? The money is enticing, but the field raises questions. In 2020, the digital artist Beeple, who makes grotesque hyper-real political cartoons, sold more than $3.5m of artworks through one such system, selling multiple editions for $969 and auctioning 21 unique pieces for six-figures. In the six months since it went live, more than $200m has been traded on the market, including a single clip of LeBron James dunking, which went for $208,000.Īt the other end of the spectrum are artist-focused systems such as Zora, Foundation and SuperRare, each more open-ended offerings that allow artists to create their own digital markets for their works. Collectors can buy booster packs containing a random collection of short clips of basketball games in action – and they can then trade and sell those clips on a digital market. At the commercial end is NBA Top Shot, a spin on trading cards, officially licensed by the National Basketball Association, made by CryptoKitties developer Dapper Labs. The leaders of the latest boom occupy various points on that spectrum. While they could still be traded and held in the same way as bitcoin – stored on a decentralised database, without any ruling authority in charge and outside the reach of much government oversight – they could represent, not just simple cash-like balances, but ownership of artworks, songs, videos or poems. The insight behind NFTs is that that need not be the case: each individual token could represent anything its makers want. Those currencies, just like real money, are “fungible”: that is, one bitcoin is functionally identical to another.
The name comes from the main difference between these projects and mainstream cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin or its hipper offspring Ethereum. The end result is a game, or art piece, that is somewhere between a real-world game of Pokémon, an automated replacement for the authenticity department at Sotheby’s and digital trading cards.Īnd if you want to join in, Pudding Daintytot is on sale for $1m (£710,000).Īs with so much in the cryptocurrency industry – the name for the field that has grown up around bitcoin and its core “blockchain” technology – the most eye-catching thing about cryptokitties and their ilk, beyond even the lurid colour schemes, are the sums attached to them.Ĭryptokitties were just the first enormous boom of the craze for non-fungible tokens, or NFTs. Each cryptokitty is registered to a bitcoin-style database, and can be traded – and bred – according to algorithmic rules set down when the CryptoKitties service was set up back in 2017 by the Canadian startup Dapper Labs.
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