1. Beeple’s NFT bubble
A digital-only artwork by artist Beeple was sold at Christie’s for a record $69m — but the winning bidder will not receive anything tangible like a sculpture or painting. Instead, they get a unique digital token known as a nonfungible token (NFT). These are seen as the digital answer to collectables, like bitcoin is to currency. Unlike traditional works of art, digital files can be endlessly duplicated. NFTs "tokenise" an artwork to create a digital ownership certificate, stored on the blockchain, that can be bought and sold. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey promoted an NFT of the first-ever tweet, his, with bids hitting $2.5m. Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, tells the BBC the NFT craze will be a bubble: "And I think we could be in that bubble right now."..
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