The recent trend toward the approval of cryptocurrency – and the subsequent financial investment – has dramatically boosted a crypto cousin’s value, especially over the past week or so.
The cousin is basically a digital collectible, and it’s not fungible (like oil or gold or other materials with a physical footprint). So important is the state of fungibility, if you will, that these collectibles are better known as “NFTs” or non-fungible tokens.
How do you measure the vale? Like any product or service, it’s worth what consumers are willing to pay – and they’re paying thousands of dollars for these tokes, which range from comic-book covers to sports memorabilia to any kind of art in between.
In a CNBC story, Sheldon Corey from Montreal, Canada, said he paid $20,000 for a computer-generated avatar from the menu provided by CryptoPunks.
Wait, what is CryptoPunks?
Its developers, Larva Labs, debuted CryptoPunks in 2017. But its past seven days, according to the website nonfungible.com, produced a sales volume topping $40 million.
Among the specific NFTs are CryptoKitties, yep, digital cats, and NBA Top Shot, a platform on which highlights from top basketball players are bought and sold.
These collectibles can come with JPEGs or GIFs; they can be attached to tweets, MP3s, or any other type of digital file and the tie-in to ethereum allows proof of individual ownership.
The market is booming.
Earlier this month, a couple of video gamers with a ton of disposable income, apparently, spent $1.5 million worth of crypto to buy an NFT for digital land plots in the game Axie Infinity.
In a vice.com story last week, Masha Vyazemsky, communications director for the NFT startup Rarible, said her platform facilitated roughly $5.6 million worth of NFT transactions by 6,482 users in the preceding month alone.
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