NFTs can take the form of any asset. Currently, some NFTs which have recently made headlines include digital art, music, digital baseball cards or even tweets! A few days ago, Jack Dorsey put a digitally autographed version of his first tweet on a platform called Valuables. The highest bid for that tweet is $2.5m. If a tweet is not your cup of tea, a $3,600 image of a Gucci branded ghost might strike your fancy. Christie’s, a major global auction house, closed the auction for the first NFT art on its platform this week.

According to Christie’s website, the sale of “Everydays: The First 5000 days” a digital collage by Beeple (a famous digital artist), marks “two industry firsts, Christie’s will be the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work with a unique NFT (Non-fungible token) — effectively a guarantee of its authenticity — and to accept cryptocurrency, in this case Ether, in addition to standard forms of payment for the singular lot.”

The auction for the art piece started at $100. It closed at $69.35m on 11th March 2021. EulerBeats, an “algorithmically generated art + music limited edition NFT of 27 originals and prints priced on a bonding curve” - i.e. music generated using mathematical formulae, generated $10.3m in transaction value over 7 days in February 2021. The most popular NFTs, however, are cyptokitties - “digital representations of cats with unique identifications on Ethereum’s blockchain”.

These tokens reproduce and create off-springs that have a new set of attributes. The cryptokitties fan base spent $20m worth of Ether (the currency for Etherium blockchain) on cryptokitties within the first few weeks of their launch.

Most of these trades are based on the Etherium blockchain and are said to have developed based on the standards features developed in the ERC-20 (defines tokens), ERC-721 (non-fungible token standard) and ERC-1155 (batching multiple NFTs) standards. ERC stands for Ethereum Request for Comments which define application-level standards for the Etherium blockchain. Other platforms like Rarible that support NFTs have also benefitted from the increased attention that NFTs have received recently. Rarible defines itself as a “creator-centric NFT marketplace and issuance platform that utilizes the RARI token to empower users who actively interact with the protocol.”. The price of the RARI token increased from $1.78 on January 12th to $34.4 on March 11th.