There is no doubt that the crypto craze has gripped the world and India is no exception. And while cryptocurrencies have become passé, 2021 made way for Non-Fungible tokens or (NFTs) which have soon become common parlance. Imagine a digital avatar or piece of art being sold for millions of dollars but has no physical form to claim. Would you still pay big bucks for it? It means one thing for the artist whose work is being purchased. But are NFTs only restricted to art?
A quick look at the Top 5 NFTs of 2021 may tell you a different story. Topping the charts as the most expensive piece was ‘The Merge by Pak which sold for a staggering $91.8 million. It shows 2 pictures of what looks like the moon, which could be appreciated as a rare sighting. But it was Beeple’s Everydays-The First 5000 Days– which comprises, as the name suggests, of 5,000 individual images created every day over a period of 13 years which took everyone by surprise. This NFT sold at a Christie’s Auction for a whopping $69 million. It also catapulted the artist to become among the most expensive living artists to date. Beeple went on to sell other NFTs too.
Among the other prominent NFTs was #Cryptopunk #7523 which sold for $11.75 mn which simply looked like a pixelated digital face. Even former Twitter top boss Jack Dorsey managed to sell his first-ever tweet for over 2 million and Tim Berners Lee, the man who created the world wide web, sold the Internet’s source code as an NFT for a whopping $5.7 million through Sotheby’s in June.
For something that doesn’t have a tangible form and is merely in a digital avatar, digital tokens are seeing monthly sales hovers around $2 bn currently. So is it just a fad or the new reality? And why are celebrities like Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan jumping on the NFT bandwagon?
According to JP Morgan, the total estimated market capital of the NFT universe could be close to $7 billion. Right from Elon musk’s former partner Grimes selling her digital artwork to Sunny Leone minting her own digital avatar everything and anything digital can be an NFT, so long as they have buyers.
The metaverse had become a platform for all these digital avatars can truly have a future. so are we ready to step into 2022 in reality as well as digitally? looking at the way things are we have already arrived.
