NFT Fever: NY Times Column About NFTs Sold for $560,000 as an NFT
NFT fever has reached its peak: A New York Times column about non-fungible tokens sold Thursday as an NFT for 350 units of Ethereum cryptocurrency — worth roughly $560,000.
Times tech columnist Kevin Roose created a digital version of his Wednesday column “Buy This Column on the Blockchain!” and then placed it up for auction on foundation.app with payment only via the Ethereum blockchain. He said that he’d donate all proceeds to the Times’ Neediest Cases Fund after converting the money from cryptocurrency into U.S. dollars.
Due to the nature of NFT auctions, there’s no way to identify the winning bidder beyond the screen name Farzin.
Once the NFT of his column had sold, Roose remained stunned. “Fully just staring at my monitor laughing uncontrollably,” he tweeted, followed by the query: “Anyone know a good crypto accountant”?
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The first bid came in at 11:16 a.m. ET on Wednesday and the bidding price ultimately reached $38,454 within first 24 hours. Roose weighed in on Thursday morning after bids topped 30.3 ETH, or roughly $48,000: “The NFT market is wild.”
In the original Wednesday column, Roose explained that an NFT is “a new kind of digital collectible item that is stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain, the distributed ledger system that underlies Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.”
As TheWrap’s Sean Burch has explained previously, an NFT is an asset that cannot be interchanged. For example: You can take a $100 bill and exchange it for five $20 bills and still retain the same value. That’s not the case with NFTs, where each token is unique and carries its own value. Instead, think of NFTs as digital collectibles.
Right now, the most common NFTs are tied to items like art, pictures and video highlights — something the NBA has already leaned into. NFTs are tracked using blockchain technology, the underlying ledger that tracks Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions. When NFTs are transferred, the transactions are verified by a network of computers, giving the new owner proof that they own the official asset.
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