What is an NFT and how does it work?

These digital certificates of authenticity, which share the same technology as cryptocurrencies, have triggered the art market and new business models.

Three letters, an acronym, have become one of the terms that have burst in with more force in recent times. It is NFT, Non-Fungible Token or Non-Fungible Tokens, which is a digital certificate of authenticity that through blockchain technology, the same one used in cryptocurrencies (tokens), is associated with a single file digital. From there, a new form of digital expression has been built on the rise.

Now let's take all this to digital. NFTs are individual units - image, video, audio, text, or compressed file - with a unique value. This is possible because each digital asset obtains an identifier in which metadata (author's name, its initial value, or its sales history) is registered using blockchain technology, which guarantees that the piece cannot be duplicated.

According to a recent analysis by ArTactic, “the art world is undergoing a generational shift towards young collectors”, especially driven by new millionaires whose fortunes come from technology companies in Asian countries.

It remains to be resolved whether NFTs have become the new bubble or, on the other hand, whether they have established themselves as one of the main agents in the art world.

Right now, huge amounts of money are being paid for files of artwork, memes, trading cards, and just about anything else that can be recorded digitally.

An exact date can be fixed when NFTs entered a new dimension. It was on March 11, 2021, when the 'Every day's - The First 5,000 Days' JPG file, created by the artist Beeple ( Mike Winkelmann) was sold for 69.3 million dollars (57.8 million euros) by Christie's auction house in New York.

FROM A 'TWEET' TO A VAN GOGH

From then on, news about pieces of crypto art multiplied throughout the world. Without leaving the month of March, a columnist for The New York Times sold one item for $560,000; an internet user bought a digital sticker of Cristiano Ronaldo for 240,000 euros; Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for $2.9 million and someone bought a digital portrait made by the robot Shopia for $650,000 at auction

Already in April 2021, the protagonist of the famous Disaster Girl meme pocketed $500,000 from the sale of the original file. In May, Larva Labs sold nine Cryptopunk heads, digital creatures designed in 2017 by the pioneering startup NFT, for $16.9 million. In July, Berners-Lee made $4.5 million from the sale of the original WWW archive, which he developed in 1991.

And already in September, Russia's leading museum, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, raised nearly half a million dollars by auctioning NFT of works from his collection, specifically a Van Gogh, a Kandinsky, a Da Vinci, a Monet, and a Giorgione.

FROM LALIGA STICKERS TO A YACHT

For its part, the NBA has raffled off great plays in the history of North American basketball in virtual card packs priced between $9 and $299, creating a new business model. Without going any further, LaLiga has recently reached an agreement with Sorare, a company owned by footballers such as Gerard Piqué, Antoine Griezmann, and Rio Ferdinand, to distribute player NFTs and thus open a new source of income for clubs. And brands like Marvel are also developing their own certified files.

Precisely, Nicolás Julia, co-founder of Sorare, defends that the NFT business is not a bubble: "There has been an upturn in interest and, although there may be a temporary overexcitement, the NFT trend is not. Like most innovations, there may be a little foam and euphoria in the market, but that's about it".

Special mention deserves the metaverse, the new parallel dimension in which tokens can end up imposing themselves as a business with incalculable potential. Not surprisingly, a few weeks ago, $650,000 was paid for the Mataflower, a digital yacht made of bits and bytes, in the Sandbox multiverse.

Meanwhile, in real life, galleries and auction houses continue to delve into the world of NFTs: Julien's Auctions in Beverly Hills is putting up a Keith Richards Gibson ES-335 guitar in an upcoming auction, accompanied by a clip of the rolling stone stamps his signature on the instrument. Today it is impossible to glimpse the limit of non-fungible tokens.