When a JPG file sold for $69 million in March this year, people responded with a mixture of amusement, outrage and utter confusion. Who was Beeple? What made his constellation of mostly undecipherable pixels valuable? And what in the world was this new technology called an NFT?
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have enjoyed extensive media coverage since Beeple sold his digital collage, “Everydays The First Five Thousand Days,” through the esteemed auction house Christie’s. While the technology behind NFTs has existed since the mid-2010s, Beeple’s high-profile sale facilitated by the same auction house that has sold famous and pricey works by Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci pushed conversations about NFTs into the mainstream. Since then, music albums, tweets and opinion columns have all been sold as NFTs often with exorbitant price tags attached.