NFT's for Non-Fungible Token, are designed to give you something that can't be copied: ownership of the work, so they allow you to buy and sell ownership of unique and non-replaceable digital items and keep track of who owns them using the blockchain. In order to understand them, you need to know that NFTs can be used to represent real-world items like artwork, drawings, animated GIFs, songs or real-estate but also can represent people's identities, property rights, and more. Unlike cryptocurrencies, they cannot be traded or exchanged at equivalency. A lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art seen as an evolution of fine art collecting, only with digital art. Some people even treat them like Pokémon cards (where they're accessible to normal people but also a playground for the mega-rich). How artists benefit from this is that it gives them a way to sell work that there otherwise might not be much of a market for, and for the buyers it lets them financially support artists they like. Now if I am a collector, NFTs can work like any other speculative asset, where I buy it and hope that the value of it goes up one day, so I can sell it for a profit.
Anyone can create an NFT. All that's needed is a digital wallet, a small purchase of Ethereum (a cryptocurrency) and a connection to an NFT marketplace where you'll be able to upload and turn the content into an NFT or crypto art. In early March, a group of NFTs by digital artist Beeple was sold for over $69 million. The sale set a precedent and a record for the most expensive pieces of digital art sold thus far. The artwork was a collage comprised of Beeple's first 5,000 days of work. Although they've been around since 2014, NFTs are gaining notoriety now because they are becoming an increasingly popular way to buy and sell digital artwork. A staggering $174 million has been spent on NFTs since November 2017. Would you be interested in creating or buying some? Sara ikram MEZOUGHI (Partenariat "LIBERTE-Digital"/"YouthBP")
