Rare Pepes appealed to a very niche audience – digital-art and blockchain nerds – but they set a precedent for blockchain-based collectibles like the now wildly popular CryptoPunks, which in turn inspired CryptoKitties, another Ethereum-based collectible set with a gamified twist: owners could “breed” their kitties to spawn even rarer new ones with specialised traits (like fur colour). Others think NFTs will accelerate societal collapse through theft and greed – and melt the polar ice caps thanks to the insane energy demands required to store all the data required to keep the blockchain running. Some people who are bullish on NFTs think that this sort of radical transparency can save art, liberate the internet, and restore democracy.
What NFTs are, fundamentally, is that record of ownership – the thing that’s owned is almost secondary. And, uh, people spent around £15 billion buying and selling these things last year. And, in some cases, they’re shockingly valuable: it’s not unheard of for certain NFTs to run to six figures. (So even if someone can copy and paste your cartoon of an ape, the real one – the only real one – is clearly and incontrovertibly yours.) Of course, NFTs aren’t just small artworks – they can serve as contracts or tickets to events or memberships in clubs. That record lives on the Ethereum blockchain – an ongoing, impossible-to-fake public ledger that shows everyone who’s ever owned the thing in question. In essence, an NFT, or non-fungible token, is just a record that someone owns something.