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NONFUNGIBLE TOKENS (NFTS)
WELCOME TO A NEW ERA IN ART COLLECTION We can’t help but wonder what Picasso, Dalí or Van Gogh would have said if they had known that a hundred years or more after creating their own masterpieces, a type of art would emerge that was 100 per cent digital, freely reproducible by anybody, and sometimes consisting of a simple snippet from a video… or if they could imagine that this type of art would fetch millions of dollars in the world’s most prestigious auctions. If you are an art investor yourself and you’d like to hone the basics of NFTs, read on and discover how much fellow investors have paid for some of the top-selling NFTs. And take note – not all NFTs are visual artworks. All they ultimately need to be is digital and unique. WORDS MARISA CUTILLAS WHAT ARE NFTS? NFTs are ‘non-fungible tokens’. They are a means of proving one’s ownership over a digital item (which usually consists of an artwork or design). ‘Fungible’ essentially means ‘exchangeable’ and most goods have this quality.
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For instance, it is possible to replace one blank notebook for another, or a trading card for another identical card. Fungible items, on the other hand, have something that makes them irreplaceable – think a first-edition, signed copy of Zafón’s The Shadow
of the Wind. The same value is applied to digital tokens, even if they have been reproduced millions of times. Investors buy into an original digital asset – something that can theoretically have as much value as any other original artwork.
