Yara Hassan | Staff Writer 

NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are blockchain-based tokens that represent a unique asset such as a work of art, digital property, or media. “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. A bitcoin, for example, is fungible, meaning you can exchange one for another and get precisely the identical item. A one-of-a-kind trade card, on the other hand, cannot be duplicated. You’d get something altogether different if you swapped it for a different card.

NFTs can be anything digital (drawings, music…), but the current buzz is focused on exploiting the technology to sell digital art. The question remains why would anyone spend millions of dollars on digital art when you can just simply screenshot it? To understand the idea clearly, we have to understand how we actually value physical art in the first place; thinking of an example would be helpful. 

Last year, an art collective called MSCHF bought a drawing by Andy Warhol for about $20,000. Then they made 999 exact copies. They mixed the original in with the rest and sold them each for $250.  Would you personally pay more if you could figure out which the original was If it came with a certificate of some kind?  Most people would. Maybe because they like it, or maybe because they think other people would and then they could sell it to them for more. 

NFTs, like traditional art, are meant to give you something you can’t get anywhere else: ownership of the piece. To put it in another way, anyone can buy a Monet print for their art collection. However, the original may only be owned by one individual. When art becomes more about the artist’s personal celebrity or the ideas behind the art than about the physical piece itself, it becomes untethered from other benchmarks of value such as lame things like “how much did that cost you to make?” or “how long did it take you?”

NFTs can function similarly to any other speculative asset in that you acquire it and hope that its value rises over time so that you can sell it for a profit. Recently, The Metapreneurs, a Lebanese project, with a collection of 11,111 unique NFTs stored in the Ethereum blockchain and over 600 unique and hand-drawn traits sold out for a total of $6 million to 6000 holders.

According to Jad Al Fakhani, Co-founder & CMO of The Metapreneurs, this is “the biggest sold-out project in Lebanon. The 3rd biggest sold-out project in the Middle East. And on the top 100 charts on OpenSea worldwide”.