The above picture is the famous Nyan Cat meme that has been on the internet for ten years now. Given its digital presence, anyone can download the file. Many people must have sent the Nyan Cat gif in chats. When something is this publicly available for people to use, why was it bought for more than US$ 600,000? This is where NFT comes in.
NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. As the name suggests, these tokens are non-exchangeable as each of them have a unique property to it. Unlike fungible things like money or bitcoins, an NFT cannot be given a value and exchanged for another NFT of equal value.
Now, coming back to the Nyan Cat. In celebration of this viral half cat half pop tart meme’s tenth anniversary, its creator, Chris Torres, put an improvised Nyan Cat gif for auction. The gif was finally sold for about US$ 600,000. What the buyer got is an NFT that represents that they have ownership of the gif.
In other words, an NFT is a token that holds the value of owning a digital asset. The people who buy the NFT do not have the crypto art to themselves but rather a certificate that says they own it. NFTs have existed since 2014. It is only now that the NFT craze has boomed. However, Beeple, the digital artist who sold the most expensive crypto art said that crypto art is a bubble and it will burst in the future.
In the meantime, NFTs are being sold for millions of dollars. Here are some of the notable ones.
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Feature Image Courtesy: Chris Torres.