Jairo Mejia
New York, Mar 3 (EFE) .- The fever for NFTs (Non-fungible token or cryptographic token) has reached the Christie’s auction house and is creating a new sector of millionaire investments in digital art or sports collectibles (a Lebron James’s mate sold for more than $ 200,000 on Monday) with the promise of turning buyers into owners of an original digital work thanks to blockchain technology.
NFTs use blockchain contract technology to create a representation of an original content that cannot be plagiarized without losing its originality certification, which opens a new world for assets such as digital art or the collecting of pieces that, for For whatever reason, they are considered valuable.
These assets go hand in hand with cryptocurrencies, which are also created with blockchain technology, but while bitcoins or other digital currencies do not differ in value between them, in the case of NFTs these differences do occur, in the same way What happens with soccer cards, Pokemon tokens or the more traditional philately.
As Pablo Rodríguez Fraile, a Spanish-American who recently carried out one of the most popular transactions in this new digital art market, explains to Efe, ‘among the most important characteristics of the NFTs is the fact that each token incorporates its unique characteristics and spreads. In addition, the blockchain allows to collect all the history of the asset, including bids, transfers, sales or bundling (combinations) ‘.
FROM KITTENS TO HIGH ART
The NFT fever was popularized with the ‘CryptoKitties’, a kitten collecting game created by the Canadian company Dapper Labs that has now evolved into art auctions or has led the NBA to sell videos of baskets to collect. .
Last week, Rodríguez Fraile sold a 10-second video created by digital artist Mike Winkelmann – who has confessed that he has only signed his works with a cryptographic token for four months – for $ 6.6 million, after acquiring it last fall. for about $ 67,000.
The auction house Christie’s will close next week its first auction of an NFT, ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’, a work by Winkelmann, known as Beeple, which could reach a new millionaire record and consolidate this type of art and asset of digital investment.
The artist Grimes, Elon Musk’s girlfriend, joined this fever for investments in NFTs last week and in a few minutes she sold almost 6 million dollars in digital art in one of the most popular platforms for this type of investment, Nifty Gateway. .
Opensea, another of those NFTs markets, where creators can put their content up for sale, has gone from moving around 5 million dollars in January to exceeding 80 million dollars in recent weeks.
DIGITAL COLLECTIONS
The wide possibilities of the NFTs have led the NBA to partner with Dapper Labs to create the Top Shot platform, where original and collectible videos of game baskets can be acquired, which thanks to blockchain technology are certified as unique and original ( although they can be reproduced, replicated and shared without maintaining that digital signature of originality).
A Lebron James dunk with the Lakers against the Sacramento Kings became the most successful digital collectible of the NBA Top Shot on Monday, selling for $ 208,000, while that new line of business has reported more than 230 million euros to date. dollars in sales, according to Dapper Labs.
As the entrepreneur Athan Slotkin told Efe, “NFTs are here to stay and are a great complement to cryptocurrencies in investment.”
The emergence of NFTs opens the door to an infinity of virtual assets to invest, from the pixelized avatars of ‘Cryptopunk’ to memes, to completely digital photographic art.
The blockchain revolution, which has led to questioning the very logic of fiat money or value agreed by a society around a piece of paper, now questions the foundations of the value of art itself or what the philosopher Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’ when in 1935 the value of a work was questioned in the era of ‘mechanical reproduction’. EFE
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