On Thursday, a humble JPG file created art history when it sold for USD 69 million, the third-highest price for an artwork by a living artist.
This was a tokenized version of the image, a non-fungible token, usually abbreviated to NFT. Non-fungible tokens or NFTs was one of the first posts on this group, where I’d described them as
For me, the best way to understand the concept of NFTs is in terms of the Mona Lisa. We’ve all seen a picture of it. We’ve seen mockups, mashups, memes, animations and all kinds of variations of it. We can hang a print of it in our living room the exact dimensions as the original.
But there’s only one ‘real’ painting, and we all take the Louvre’s word that it’s the authentic one. In the case of something that is a non-fungible token, it’s the public blockchain that sets in stone the authenticity of one instance of it.
In the case of Nyan Cat, the animated ‘cat-with-pop-tart-body-zooming-leaving-a-rainbow-trail’ [that sold for over half a million dollars], I have a GIF of it in my camera roll, but only one person owns the ‘real’, ‘authentic’ Nyan Cat animation because there is only a single file ‘issued’ by the artist. And that authenticity can be verified by anyone.
Another notable thing is that the auction took place on a platform run by the auction house Christie’s, which is itself over 250 years old.
You can see the wallet address of the token in the screenshot.
PS: the artist, Mike Winkelmann aka Beeple, reacted suitably. Perhaps that tweet will be an NFT soon too.