The Verge website provides a definition that the layman (like myself) can understand: NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied. You have ownership of the work, though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork. To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.
These trendy forms of ethereal blockchain can really be anything digital – some of the most popular NFTs are digital forms of artwork. And some sell for massive amounts of money: the most expensive to date was The Merge, a digital artwork created by anonymous digital artist ‘Pak’. It was sold on 6 December 2021 for $91.8 million on the NFT trading platform Nifty Gateway.
Now, artists and celebrities, and fashion, music, tech and sports brands are increasingly creating, buying and selling ‘tokens’. This means that some weird ones can slip through the cracks...