{"id":25412,"date":"2021-03-16T12:52:27","date_gmt":"2021-03-16T12:52:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/?p=25412"},"modified":"2021-03-16T12:53:00","modified_gmt":"2021-03-16T12:53:00","slug":"non-fungible-tokens-are-useful-innovative-and-frothy-the-economist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wealinternational.com.br\/en\/non-fungible-tokens-are-useful-innovative-and-frothy-the-economist\/","title":{"rendered":"Non-fungible tokens are useful, innovative\u2014and frothy (The Economist)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The craze extends from digital art to sports clips and cat cartoons<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cEQUIVALENT VIII\u201d by Carl Andre was a minimalist sculpture bought by Britain\u2019s Tate Gallery in 1972. The Tate described the work as \u201ca rectangular arrangement of 120 firebricks…altering the viewer\u2019s relationship to the surrounding space\u201d. The public called it a pile of bricks. A few years later newspapers execrated the gallery for having wasted brick-shaped wads of cash on the avant-garde work.<\/p>\n

Once again, a famous institution is embracing a controversial new genre. On March 11th Christie\u2019s sold a digital collage of images called \u201cEverydays\u2014The First 5000 Days\u201d for a cool $69.3m. The sale elevated the work\u2019s hitherto-obscure creator, Mike Winkelmann, aka Beeple, to the august company of David Hockney and Jeff Koons, the only two living painters to sell at such prices.<\/p>\n

Christie\u2019s sold the artwork as a \u201cnon-fungible token\u201d (NFT), a craze for which has gripped Silicon Valley\u2019s elite for the past few weeks. An NFT is a secure, blockchain-based record<\/a> that represents pieces of digital media. Invented only a few years ago, a token can link not only to a piece of digital art but to videos, music, text, memes or bits of code.<\/p>\n

The pile-of-bricks criticism of digital artworks is that, in contrast to physical collectibles, such objects can be copied with perfect fidelity and consumed infinitely online. They thus have limited inherent value. A token brings bragging rights to a unique, authenticated version of a digital artwork, sports clip, song or cute image of a cat (which first earned NFTs their popularity). Another attraction for the creative world is that NFTs make it easy to build in payments to artists each time their works are sold on; the tokens often include code that pays royalties on secondary sales.<\/p>\n

Since almost anything can be tokenised and sold if punters are willing, the craze stretches well beyond pictures. Kings of Leon, a rock band, is selling a new album as an NFT and the National Basketball Association is selling clips of famous dunks. Creators can turn to a growing collection of marketplaces, such as OpenSea and Nifty Gateway. Even individual tweets are going for substantial sums (leading some to wonder if the former tweeter-in-chief, Donald Trump, could flog bits of his oeuvre).<\/p>\n

The humdinger Beeple sale, plus the arrival of ever more creators, means a mania that has been largely confined to crypto and techie circles could move mainstream. The global NFT market grew from a few tens of millions of dollars in annual sales a few years ago to over $300m in the past month alone, according to Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm. NFTs mesh with the massive network effects of social media and meme culture, notes Sam Hart of the Interchain Foundation, a Swiss backer of blockchain infrastructure. There has been little time to educate buyers, he says.<\/p>\n