What do you think of the $3,600 Gucci Ghost? Also, you didn’t let me finish earlier. That image that Beeple was auctioning off at Christie’s ended up selling for $69 million, which, by the way, is $15 million more than Monet’s painting Nymphéas sold for in 2014. This last sold for $3,600, but the current owner is asking for $16,300. GIF by Trevor Andrew Whoever got that Monet can actually appreciate it as a physical object. With digital art, a copy is literally as good as the original. But the flex of owning an original Beeple... I think I remember hearing that NFTs are already over. Didn’t the boom go bust? Like for real this time? Sales have absolutely slumped since their peak, though like with seemingly everything in crypto there’s always somebody declaring it over and done with right before a big spike. Am I predicting that NFTs are about to make a comeback? Absolutely not, but I’m sure there are plenty of folks in NFT-based communities that are sure they’re still on the gravy train. Oh no you’re about to talk about the apes aren’t you? Sure am! If you haven’t heard about the Bored Ape Yacht Club, it’s one of the most successful NFT projects, with apes (which are procedurally generated and have unique characteristics) selling for millions of dollars. The company behind the series of NFTs has created a spin-off cryptocurrency, broken the blockchain for a few hours with how popular one of their sales was, and even acquired other massive NFT brands. And a reminder: this all happened because people really like saying that they own a picture of a Bored Ape. People like, for instance, Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton, who discussed their apes on TV in a clip that went viral for being soooo uncomfortable. This kind of club isn’t really a new phenomenon — people have long built communities based on things they own, and now it’s happening with NFTs. It could be argued that one of the earliest NFT projects, CryptoPunks, got big thanks to its community.
That really depends on whether you’re an artist or a buyer. I’m an artist. First off: I’m proud of you. Way to go. You might be interested in NFTs because it gives you a way to sell work that there otherwise might not be much of a market for. If you come up with a really cool digital sticker idea, what are you going to do? Sell it on the iMessage App Store? No way. Also, some NFT marketplaces have a feature where you can make sure you get paid a percentage every time your NFT is sold or changes hands. That makes sure that if your work gets super popular and balloons in value, you’ll see some of that benefit. I’m a buyer. One of the obvious benefits of buying art is it lets you financially support artists you like, and that’s true with NFTs (which are way trendier than, like, Telegram stickers). Buying an NFT also usually gets you some basic usage rights, like being able to post the image online or set it as your profile picture. Plus, of course, there are bragging rights that you own the art, with a blockchain entry to back it up.
No, I meant I’m a collector. Ah, okay, yes. NFTs can work like any other speculative asset, where you buy it and hope that the value of it goes up one day, so you can sell it for a profit. I feel kind of dirty for talking about that, though. So every NFT is unique? In the boring, technical sense that every NFT is a unique token on the blockchain. But while it could be like a van Gogh, where there’s only one definitive actual version, it could also be like a trading card, where there’s 50 or hundreds of numbered copies of the same artwork. Who would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for what basically amounts to a trading card? Well, that’s part of what makes NFTs so messy. Some people treat them like they’re the future of fine art collecting (read: as a playground for the mega-rich), and some people treat them like Pokémon cards (where they’re accessible to normal people but also a playground for the mega-rich). Speaking of Pokémon cards, Logan Paul sold some NFTs relating to a million-dollar box of the— Please stop. I hate where this is going. You’ve activated my trap card (which sold for $17,000). Image by Logan Paul Yeah, he sold NFT video clips, which are just clips from a video you can watch on YouTube anytime you want, for up to $20,000. He also sold NFTs of a Logan Paul Pokémon card. Who paid $20,000 for a video clip of Logan Paul?!
A fool and their money are soon parted, I guess? It would be hilarious if Logan Paul decided to sell 50 more NFTs of the exact same video. Linkin Park’s Mike Shinoda (who also sold some NFTs that included a song) actually talked about that. It’s totally a thing someone could do if they were, in his words, “an opportunist crooked jerk.” I’m not saying that Logan Paul is that, just that you should be careful who you buy from. Are NFTs mainstream now? It depends on what you mean. If you’re asking if, say, my mom owns one, the answer is no. The response from my mom when I asked her about owning NFTs. But we have seen big brands and celebrities like Marvel and Wayne Gretzky launch their own NFTs, which seem to be aimed at more traditional collectors, rather than crypto-enthusiasts. While I don’t think I’d call NFTs “mainstream” in the way that smartphones are mainstream, or Star Wars is mainstream, they do seem to have, at least to some extent, shown some staying power even outside of the cryptosphere. But what do The Youth think of them? Ah yes, excellent question. We here at The Verge have an interest in what the next generation is doing, and it certainly does seem like some of them have been experimenting with NFTs. An 18 year-old who goes by the name FEWOCiOUS says that his NFT drops have netted over $17 million — though obviously most haven’t had the same success. The New York Times talked to a few teens in the NFC space, and some said they used NFTs as a way to get used to working on a project with a team, or to just earn some spending money.
Okay, but what does Keanu Reeves think of NFTs? He doesn’t seem impressed. That moment would make a great NFT. Someone thought that too, and minted that clip as an NFT. It wasn’t us though! Rampant copyright infringement is an ongoing problem in the space. One of the post popular NFT trading sites estimated that over 80 percent of the artwork minted using its free tool were “plagiarized works, fake collections, and spam.” Which is, you know, not a great look? RELATED The counterfeit NFT problem is only getting worse Can I buy this article as an NFT? No, but technically anything digital could be sold as an NFT (including articles from Quartz and The New York Times, provided you have anywhere from $1,800 to $560,000). deadmau5 has sold digital animated stickers. William Shatner has sold Shatner-themed trading cards (one of which was apparently an X-ray of his teeth). This one I like. Maybe not for $700, but... Image by deadmau5 and Mad Dog Jones Gross. Actually, could I buy someone’s teeth as an NFT? There have been some attempts at connecting NFTs to real-world objects, often as a sort of verification method. Nike has patented a method to verify sneakers’ authenticity using an NFT system, which it calls CryptoKicks. But so far, I haven’t found any teeth, no. I’m scared to look.
EtherscanLook? Where? There are several marketplaces that have popped up around NFTs, which allow people to buy and sell. These include OpenSea, Rarible, and Grimes’ choice, Nifty Gateway, but there are plenty of others. I’ve heard there were kittens involved. Tell me about the kittens. NFTs really became technically possible when the Ethereum blockchain added support for them as part of a new standard. Of course, one of the first uses was a game called CryptoKitties that allowed users to trade and sell virtual kittens. Thank you, internet. I love kittens. Not as much as the person who paid over $170,000 for one. My face when I’m worth $170K. Image: Cryptokitties.co Arrrrrggggg! Same. At one point I thought that the kittens would be used in games in a somewhat interesting ways. That glimmer of hope has been decimated by the fact that almost every salesperson in the NFT space promises that their tokens will be part of a game or metaverse. When real game developers like Ubisoft and the studio behind STALKER have said they’d integrate NFTs into their games... people reacted VERY negatively. The companies have either had to scrap their plans entirely or severely tone down the amount of blockchain stuff in their games.
Of course, there have been a few fun experiments in the NFT space (though I’ll admit that at least one of them was poking fun at the concept of NFTs), but... listen, one of the most successful NFT-based games is kind of a weird version of feudalism, and also got mega-hacked. So there’s that. At least it’s not digital pet rocks... right? In fact, there are people who spent tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on NFT pet rocks (the website for which says that the rocks serve no purpose other than being tradable and limited). Can I cry on your shoulder? Only if I can cry on yours. Could I pull off a museum heist to steal NFTs? This image is not an NFT. Yet. Image: Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers That depends. Part of the allure of blockchain is that it stores a record of each time a transaction takes place, making it harder to steal and flip than, say, a painting hanging in a museum.
Or at least that’s the theory. In reality, many, many people have gotten their NFTs stolen by attackers using a variety of tactics. To be clear, hackers aren’t always playing 5D chess here. For the ever complicated hack of the programs that control the flow of crypto, there’s a case where someone was tricked into signing a transaction they shouldn’t have through run-of-the-mill phishing. RELATED OpenSea’s official Discord compromised in a phishing attack that stole at least $18k worth of NFTs Note: Please don’t steal. Should I be worried about digital art being around in 500 years? Probably. Bit rot is a real thing: image quality deteriorates, file formats can’t be opened anymore, websites go down, people forget the password to their wallets. But physical art in museums is also shockingly fragile. But wait, doesn’t the fact that they’re on the blockchain make them permanent? Okay, so this is a whole thing. Technically, yes: when you say NFT you’re referring to an entry on the blockchain. However, the actual media, like the picture, GIF, or flagrant flaunting of copyright law is very rarely actually stored on the blockchain — it’d be too expensive to do that. Sometimes the media the NFT points to is stored on a cloud service, which isn’t exactly decentralized. Since this has come up as an issue, with people worried that their NFT proving they watched the Lions lose could go poof if one company goes under or changes their URL scheme, many in the NFT space have been turning to decentralized storage solutions like the InterPlanetary File System that use torrent-like technology. It’s not bulletproof, but it’s better than having your million-dollar JPG stored on Google Photos. Torrent-like? So people are pirating NFTs? No... Well, kinda, but hold that thought. The idea behind IPFS is that files are stored on a peer-to-peer network, meaning they could be stored on several computers at once. Files are given an identifier, and when a computer goes to load the file it asks the IPFS network to give it the file with that ID. Any of the computers storing it can say, “Oh, here it is!”
SorareWhen you make an NFT, the content link is baked into the token. If that link goes to IPFS, it’ll be pointing to something that’s more permanent than, say, an image on a regular server. In theory, anyways. Of course, distributed does not equal perfect. Experts have warned that files could still end up on a single computer, and could be lost in the case of a hard drive crash. RELATED Your million-dollar NFT can break tomorrow if you’re not careful Okay, so what’s that you said about pirating? So someone created this site called The NFT Bay as a sort of art project, where they put up a torrent pointing to a 19TB ZIP file, which they said included every NFT on the Ethereum and Solana blockchains. There’s some doubt about whether was actually a treasure trove of NFTs (if such a thing could be referred to as “treasure”), but in theory it’s actually possible to scan the blockchain to find every record of an NFT being minted, and download the media it links to. Real or not, it was an incredible piece of performance art, sparking a conversation (okay, closer to a flame war) about the right-clicker mindset. NFT games are a blockchain space trend. When finance met the gaming industry, it created a whole new space called Game-Fi that provides gamers with an opportunity to earn crypto by playing games.
NFT games offer players to earn in various ways thanks to the “Play-to-Earn” concept. The longer you play, the more tokens and NFTs you will get. The earned tokens keep utility inside the game or can be sold within exchanges. Players usually use wallets to store their NFTs. Here’s an example of one of them — trust wallet. Our Personal Top 5 of NFT Games in 2022 Where to Store NFTs? Our Personal Top 5 of NFT Games in 2022 1. Axie Infinity Axie Infinity is one of the leaders in NFT games, with 2.8 million daily active players. This game allows players to earn AXS tokens while playing. The tokens are used in the platform’s governance. Players can start gaming by buying at least three digital pets called Axies and raising them to create generations of them. Each Axie leaves its genes to its descendants, passing on such characteristics as weaknesses, strengths, etc. Players should try to make a unique breed of Axies with the rarest traits to get a high price for them on the Ethereum NFT marketplaces, where the creatures can be traded. According to the Axie Infinity official website, the most expensive Axie ever sold was for $820,000. On top of it, $3.6 billion in transactions have taken place in their in-house marketplace.
Alien Worlds Another giant is Alien Worlds, with over 1.1 million users. While playing, you earn Trilium (TLM), which gives you the power to control the Planet Decentralized Autonomous Organizations or Planet DAOs and access additional gameplay. It’s a stimulator of economic competition and motivates players to participate in council candidate elections or run for the planetary council. Players can go on missions and look for NFTs that can be used for mining Trilium or for having battles and going on various missions. NFTs have different levels of rarity and shininess, which give them different levels of value within the game. Gods Unchained Gods Unchained is a trading card NFT game that’s also based on the play-to-earn model. This free-to-play game gives players complete ownership over their in-game items, meaning they’re free to sell, trade, or use their cards as they wish. New players get 140 free cards at the beginning to get a handle on how to play the game. Each card has some special powers and is categorized based on rarity, tribe, god, etc. The main idea is to build decks that can apply different tactics to fool their opponents. It’s not cheap to play because of high gas fees, though. ImmutableX built its marketplace in 2021, and now it acts as a gas-free hub for trading Gods Unchained cards and other NFT projects.