Cryptoart craze: From Kings of Leon to Nyan Cat

If you are a pretty active Internet user, you must have seen the word NFT roaming around your social media feeds. NFT, shot for non-fungible token, is now a bandwagon that everyone seems to jump onto. Even public figures want a piece of it.

Kings of Leon just launched their album, ‘When You See Yourself’, in the form of NFT, claiming to be the first musician to do that. The band generated around $2 million from the sale of the album during the first week after release.

Fellow musician Grimes sold $6 million worth of artworks as NFTs in less than 20 minutes. Just like her partner Elon Musk, Grimes has been all about cryptocurrency. She even calls herself “Crypto Queen” on her social media bio.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey also joined the NFT craze. He put his first-ever tweet up for auction. It was sold to the CEO of Malaysia-based blockchain company Bridge Oracle, Sina Estavi. The exchange platform Dorsey used is Valuables, a blockchain-based platform that allows users to sell and/or buy tweets with Ethereum as the cryptocurrency.

The hype of cryptocurrency does not stop there. An animated cat with pop-tart body leaving a rainbow trail, or widely known as “Nyan Cat Gif,” was sold as an NFT for $600,000 in February. The gif was a popular meme back in 2011 and dearly loved by Internet users.

The rise of cryptoart as collectible items has driven their price. Digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold his artwork as NFT for $3.5 million last December. Several months later when NFT made headlines, he auctioned his digital artwork at auction house Christie’s and the highest bid reached $69 million.