If Nike went out of business, those sneakers wouldn’t suddenly disappear from your closet. When asked to explain NFTs, Duncan used this analogy: Imagine you owned a pair of expensive Air Jordans. Nifty Gateway was founded in 2018 by the absurdly named Duncan Cock Foster, twenty-six, and his twin brother, Griffin. To understand how that piece of art sells for the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, one needs a brief primer on something called nonfungible tokens, or NFTs-digital goods that are bought and sold on emerging websites like Nifty Gateway, which hosted the Beeple auction. Theoretically, yes, but the crypto art scene uses blockchain technology to authenticate and identify a single, unique piece of digital art. Mickey Rapkin explains this concept in his Esquire article "‘Beeple Mania’: How Mike Winkelmann Makes Millions Selling Pixels": Why would someone pay $777,777 for an MP4? Couldn’t you watch that on Instagram for free? NFTs are connected to the Ethereum blockchain like this: you buy a NFT (say a piece of art from Beeple Crap) and the unique bit of information about that artwork-including its smart contract-is stored on the blockchain. Picture a ledger that lives online, keeping a publicly accessible record of who owns what, similar to the kinds of networks that ground cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Dogecoin. So NFTs are a form of digital asset, whose ownership is recorded on a blockchain. But the deeper concept of NFT art is agreed-upon value and ownership even if anyone can see, download, print out and hang up a piece of digital art, only a select few can actually own that exact piece. Then, that piece of art can be seen, screen-shotted, and downloaded by anyone online. It's easy enough to wrap your head around the fact that a piece of art can be created and exist on a screen, be it your phone, computer, tablet, etc. To keep all the parts in place, there's enforced (artificial, but isn't everything?) scarcity. You possess the token that says you own something, like an art piece, and you can trade it, but if you do, you'll be getting an entirely different piece. ![]() NFT stands for "non-fungible token." This kind of token is like Bitcoin, except while you can trade Bitcoin and have more of the same thing that represents real money at a varying market value, each NFT is unique.
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