We only loved non-fungible tokens – now all but worthless – during a pandemic peak of online loneliness. What will the next craze look like?
With last week’s report that 95% of them are now worthless, I think it’s just about safe to say that the NFT moment is finally over. Phew. There really was a six-week period at the start of last year when I thought I was going to have to attach my digital soul for ever to a really bad picture of a monkey with a tentacle coming out of its nose and mouth. I kept practising saying, “No, it’s actually quite cool! It’s good. And it only cost me about as much as a car!” in the mirror a lot, with a ghoulish rictus grin.
NFT, as was probably explained to you hundreds of times in the period from January 2021 to about May 2022, stands for “non-fungible token”, and essentially means that you can buy a code that says you own a digital asset, which is then stored on the blockchain, a sort of centralised public transaction ledger. There was a lot of hyped future uses for this technology, but for the most part it was used to buy jpegs of monkeys, or maybe sometimes a lion.
