The Guggenheims Of NFTs

Perhaps you’ve heard of nonfungible tokens? These collectors already have millions of dollars’ worth

- James Tarmy and Olga Kharif

A few months before nonfungible tokens exploded into the public consciousness, the field was already pretty big, with some 75,000 buyers in 2020, according to a report by market researcher NonFungible and L’Atelier BNP Paribas. But it was also still sleepy.

The term “NFT” is often used as a shorthand for a certain kind of blockchain-linked artwork, but it really refers to the digital certificate of authenticity to which these artworks are attached. The first ones were conceived as early as 2012, as digital coins that represented coupons, subscriptions, or company shares. An NFT can be created for anything, whether a century-old painting or a tweet, attesting to the blockchain’s guarantee that it’s the original, no matter how many free JPEG replicas you can dig up on Google Images. Half of the NFT sales made in 2020, according to the NonFungible report, were related to video games; 8% were connected to metaverses, virtual “worlds” where participants can buy land and virtual goods. Artworks made up only 5% of NFTs’ total market distribution, and most sold for under $100.

In March, though, NFT art began seizing headlines. Christie’s auctioned a collage of images by the creator known as Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann, a graphic designer in Charleston, S.C.) to a Singapore-based crypto investor who paid $69.3 million worth of Ether, more than 10 times the record value of any other known NFT sale. Images by other artists, such as Pak, Mad Dog Jones, and Micah Johnson, started routinely selling for tens of thousands of dollars on digital marketplaces such as OpenSea and Nifty Gateway. As curiosity spiked, everything from (real) houses to Taco Bell-licensed pictures of Mexican food to LeBron James dunk highlights began to come with an NFT. Charmin released images they of course called NFTPs.