NFT: The Next Frontier

Everything you wanted to know about the digital token that’s taking the world by storm and upturning the meaning of face value.

- Christel Escosa and Charmaine Ho

You couldn’t have missed the headlines. On 11 March, an artwork by digital artist Beeple (aka Michael Joseph Winkelmann), titled Everyday: The First 5000 Days, went under the hammer at Christie’s for a whopping US$69.3 million (nearly S$93 million). The sale saw Christie’s become the first major auction house to offer a digital work with a unique NFT (or non-fungible token) and to do so through the cryptocurrency Ether. A little over a week later, the headlines hit closer to home when it was revealed that the buyer of the artwork was Singapore-based crypto-entrepreneur Vignesh Sundaresan, aka Metakovan—putting this island at the front of a new tech craze that’s sweeping across the digital world.

And it’s not just cultural bastions such as Christie’s or even Italy’s Uffizi Gallery (it sold a Michelangelo NFT for US$170,000 in May) that are making the NFT headlines either. With Grimes having reportedly sold more than US$5.8 million worth of tokenized artworks in her first NFT drop (the sale lasted just 20 minutes) and model-cum-actress Cara Delevingne looking to cash in with an NFT video of her talking about her vagina (it’s for a good cause), NFT, complete with all its meta-sounding technobabble, has officially hit the mainstream. So if you’re looking to understand what an NFT is exactly and what it means when something is non-fungible, then let’s recap the googleable.