From Reason.com…..
NFTs: so hot right now. You might have heard so much about these eye-popping auctions for weirdo jpegs on the internet that you’re pretty sick of them by now. For those still on the bubbly side of the hype cycle, “non-fungible tokens” can seem like the solution to online art monetization. For everyone else, NFTs seem mostly like a high-tech way to part a fool from his money.
And lots of money is changing hands. One market tracker reports some $500 billion in all time NFT sale volume shuttled through top markets like Cryptopunks, Hashmasks, and Makersplace. But this is a superstar market. Most NFTs go for nothing at all, while a few supernovas go superviral (and strike it super rich).
Beeple, the closest thing we have to an enfant terrible of the NFT art scene, set the record when he sold a collection of digital grotesques for (of course) $69 million through a Christie’s managed auction. This wouldn’t be the art world if a record-setting event wasn’t marred by allegations of self-promotion and possible scamming: The proud purchaser of EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, was revealed to be the Beeple- and crypto-investor MetaKovan, who had a financial interest in pumping up the price of Beeple works and NFTs more generally.
But with numbers like these, it is no wonder so many have rushed to cash in literally and metaphorically on this hot new trend. And these days, the money is cheap.
