NFT ABC
Non Fungible Tokens are a new way to prove ownership of things, any things – immaterial ones included, which is the interesting part for digital artists: for the first time they can pin their creations down in virtual realms, sign it and sell it to the highest bidder. A commodification previously reserved for physical art at fine arts institutions. This expansion of the art market makes room for digital artworks, memes, gifs and even tweets to be traded in their own right and earn their creators a living. This revolution has resulted in an opening party at the intersection of art and tech and the banners say NFT.

What, exactly, is an NFT?
An NFT is a new digital file format. Behind the screen
you’re scrolling from is a system of information represented by Ones and Zeros. A Non Fungible Token formats those figures into a unique code, and in a given network of computers, each one updates to verify two things about that unique code:

1. that the information is indeed a unique sequence – creating authenticity, and

2. that it was authored by you – creating trackable ownership

Before a chain of computers could perform this automated consensus, you needed centralised human verification to ultimately confirm truths. As human nature is corruptible, this proved to be an easily corruptible system. It is harder to corrupt a computer protocol designed to cut out the middleman. This is the basic setup of the blockchain, and why it has revolutionised trade – it has digitised it, decentralised it from single human verification, and has linked digital actions to nearly incorruptible blocks of code, making it ‘unfunge-withable’ by generating Non Fungible Tokens.