Everything We’re Reading about NFTs

Art collecting has always been somewhat inscrutable to outsiders. Why exactly would someone pay $91 million for a sculpture of a rabbit? It’s complicated. But at least you have something shiny to take home. Add in the Internet, and things get downright mystifying. Investors have recently been spending millions of dollars to “own” online images, GIFs, videos, songs, and other digital assets known as NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. In March alone, a video clip of a LeBron James dunk sold for $208,000, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first-ever tweet for $2.9 million, and Christie’s auctioned off a collage of the digital artist Beeple’s images for $69.3 million, the third-highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living creator.

But just because you own the NFT doesn’t mean you’re the only one who can see it. Right now, anybody with a web connection can watch the LeBron dunk, download the Beeple collage, or screenshot Dorsey’s famous tweet. NFTs aren’t the artwork themselves. They are more like digital certificates of authenticity verifying ownership. NFTs representing different pieces of media are recorded and tracked on a digital ledger called the blockchain, the same technology that powers cryptocurrency.

As with anything involving massive piles of money, people have strong opinions about the appeal of NFTs, even reaching SNL parody status. To make sense of it all, we’ve gathered some of the best writing about the phenomenon, including the nitty gritty on how NFTs work, how they could change the Internet, and whether it’s all a massive bubble.