They are called “nft”, “non fungible tokens”. In other words, they are certificates of digital ownership: they do not assign you a physical object, but precisely the unique certification that any digital object (a tweet, a multimedia work of art, a record, a graphic work, in general a document electronic) belongs to you. Although, by its very nature, anyone can continue to use it, reproduce it and modify it. Instead of a notary, this exchange is guaranteed by the Ethereum blockchain, a cross-checking system between computers and server farms based on a global web of computers engaged in solving complex mathematical calculations. The phenomenon exploded a few years ago with the CryptoKitties, collectible kittens around which a certain movement had developed, even if reduced to a niche of fans. Now the bubble of “non-fungible tokens” is literally exploding: the auction sale of the first tweet published in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and CEO of Twitter, for $ 2.9 million is just the clearest proof. To make sure the Malaysian businessman Sina Estavi, CEO of Bridge Oracle. Fortunately, the amount was immediately donated to charity: but the question does not change.
In recent weeks, for example, Christie’s had auctioned a digital collage by the artist Beeple, the designer’s stage name Mike Winkelmann, for $ 69 million. “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, this is the name of the .jpg image, has no frame or canvas, and will not even reach the buyer’s home: it will remain where it is, that is, online, available to everyone. Those who bought it are assigned a token containing metadata, a unique certificate that experts have been wondering about for some time. What happens if the owner changes it? What if the site from which the transaction transited closes? In theory, not much, because the value of a smart contract lies precisely in its immutability and in the fact that it is guaranteed by the blockchain that certified it.
Also in recent times platforms dedicated to the sale of practically any fragment of digital life you can imagine are taking off: on Nba Top Shot over 100 thousand users have spent over 250 million dollars exchanging, as digital stickers, short clips of basketball games. Sorare uses the same system with a mechanism that rides the fantasy football and collectible cards of the players. The auction houses, as seen, are queuing up and the new partner is doing rich deals Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, the artist Claire Boucher (aka Grimes) which has sold multimedia content in this mode for several million dollars on another dedicated platform, Nft Nifty Gateway. Behind which the twins Cameron and Tyler Winkelvoss, King Midas of fintech, those to whom many years ago Mark Zuckerberg would have stolen the idea of Facebook.
Again: at the beginning of March the American band Kings of Leon announced that they would be selling a limited edition of their new album “When you see yourself” as a non fungible token. What does it mean? In this case, in addition to the mere satisfaction and the certificate, there are also physical benefits such as vinyl copies and front row seats for future concerts. A sign of how the NFT solution can be very versatile, mixing online guarantees and offline benefits. The magazine Time, one of the most widely read in the world, has instead just auctioned two historic covers and an unpublished one for several thousand dollars.
In short, on the one hand there is the evergreen logic of the collection, on the other that of investment. In between, the endless range of what can actually be collected or become a source of income or speculation thanks to this recording spread on thousands of computers: practically every declination of human activity. Even i meme, which would seem at least to be connected to a specific author because graphic short circuits are the result of the collective intelligence of the web and social networks: the famous gif “Nyan Cat”, that of the kitten with the body of a biscuit flying in the wake of a rainbow and known online for many years, it has been sold by the author Chris Torres for 500 thousand dollars. Simply, we have found a way to indisputably and apparently immutable sign a work, assigning it to a user who has an Ethereum wallet (which is not just for buying and selling the associated cryptocurrency, Ether), certifying through review and shared registration a certain alphanumeric string that represents that digital object, whatever it is.
As we said, platforms have been born and grown in recent times which, on the one hand, put themselves to work by proposing content on which to invest and exchange and on the other limit themselves to favoring this market. In addition to the aforementioned Nifty Gateway there are Known Origin, Open Sea, Valuables (which is the site on which Dorsey conducted his experiment with the millionaire tweet). The same marketplaces are sailing with the wind in their sails, raising funding and expanding their activities to run after this fever that some bluntly call a bubble. There are dozens of them: CryptoPunks, Rarible, Foundation are some of the best known. And it’s safe to bet that some network giants will soon move to occupy that nascent space, if they haven’t already done so with the intertwining of financing and investments.
Absolute speculation? Maybe. And the fluctuations, comparable to those that cryptocurrencies such as Ether and Bitcoin periodically undergo, would seem to testify in favor of this reading. Epochal solution to tracking and to new forms of market through which to buy even what was previously essentially unavailable and difficult to carry around? This is also a road: the labyrinth of objects, files, digital and physical products, food and supplies, conditions and status to be certified to guarantee their portability from one environment to another, also in this case physical or digital, is practically infinite. and with no exit. The same blockchain has been used for years for experiments of all kinds, from elections to tracking agricultural products and there are those who are thinking about it for the “health passports” that rekindle tourism after Covid-19 (the app is called My Heath Passport). Although, on everything, the issue of copyright remains to be clarified, especially for multimedia creations, because the purchase of these smart contracts does not include copyright in the same way that if you buy a vintage Rolling Stones vinyl. you will not collect the proceeds of the copyright but you will only be able to monetize the ownership of a valuable piece.
At the base there are, as always, awareness and trust, two factors that are difficult to feed into the general public on issues so complicated only to understand: cryptocurrencies, the daily bread of many for several years, remain unknown dimensions to a large part of the population and viewed with skepticism. by many authorities around the world. The road is long but perhaps the key to investment collectibles seems less threatening than that of an alternative currency to allow the mechanism to hatch from its niche. Even if the underlying principle is exactly the same.
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