![]() He and his art director, Mike Parisella, who goes by the name Slimesunday, began selling unreleased songs with exclusive visual effects. Justin Blau, a DJ who goes by 3LAU, turned to NFTs after the pandemic halted his touring. ![]() And the start of the NBA season drew people to the leagues new digital trading cards. High-profile NFT releases from Deadmau5, the music producer, and Justin Roiland, the creator of the cartoon Rick and Morty, drew attention. As day trading has risen alongside the stock market in the pandemic, investors have looked for riskier and more esoteric places to make money, from sneakers and streetwear to wine and art.Īt the same time, soaring cryptocurrency prices meant more Bitcoin millionaires had money to burn. The market for NFTs began to pick up last year, with more than 222,000 people participating in $250 million worth of sales, quadrupling the volume in 2019, according to, which tracks the market. Youre buying a feeling, Horowitz added. ∺ $200 pair of sneakers is, like, $5 in plastic, Andreessen said. They buy them for their aesthetics and design. But people dont buy things like sneakers, art or baseball cards for the value of their materials, he and his partner, Ben Horowitz, explained. ∺ lot of people are cynical about this kind of thing, said Marc Andreessen, a venture capital investor at Andreessen Horowitz, in a discussion on the social media app Clubhouse this month. And there is uncertainty over the stability of values, since many of the transactions are using cryptocurrencies, which have fluctuated wildly in worth over the last two years.īut true believers remind people that most big things in tech from Facebook and Airbnb to the internet itself and mobile phones often start out looking like toys. Many see it as a form of entertainment that mixes gambling, sports card collecting, investing and day trading.Įye-popping NFT sale prices have attracted some of the same confusion and derision that have long haunted the cryptocurrency world, which has struggled to find a good use for its technology beyond currency trading. Others are trying to make a quick buck as cryptocurrency prices surge. Some NFT buyers are collectors and fans who show off what they have bought on social media or screens around their homes. The nascent market for these items reflects a notable, technologically savvy move by creators of digital content to connect financially with their audience and eliminate middlemen. In an NFT sale, all the computers hooked into a cryptocurrency network record the transaction on a shared ledger, a blockchain, making it part of a permanent public record and serving as a sort of certification of authenticity that cannot be altered or erased. NFTs rely on the technology to designate an official copy of a piece of digital media, allowing artists, musicians, influencers and sports franchises to make money selling digital goods that would otherwise be cheap or free. But digital media has not had the same value because it can be easily copied, shared and stolen.īlockchain technology, which is most often associated with Bitcoin, is changing that. People have long attached emotional and aesthetic value to physical goods, like fine art or baseball cards, and have been willing to pay a lot of money for them. This month, actress Lindsay Lohan sold an image of her face for over $17,000 and, in a nod to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, declared, I believe in a world which is financially decentralized. It was quickly resold for $57,000. Other digital tokens recently sold include a clip of LeBron James blocking a shot in a Lakers basketball game that went for $100,000 in January and a Twitter post by Mark Cuban, the investor and Dallas Mavericks owner, that went for $952. Theyre buying bragging rights and the knowledge that their copy is the authentic one. The sale was a new high point in a fast-growing market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media called NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. The buyers are usually not acquiring copyrights, trademarks or even the sole ownership of whatever it is they purchase. I feel like Ive opened the floodgates, he said in an interview Friday. Nyan Cat was sold to a user identified only by a cryptocurrency wallet number. In the final hour of the auction, there was a bidding war. On Thursday, he put a one-of-a-kind version of it up for sale on Foundation, a website for buying and selling digital goods. In the 10 years since Chris Torres created Nyan Cat, an animated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, the meme has been viewed and shared across the web hundreds of millions of times.
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