New York Times column sold as NFT for over half a million dollars

The newspaper’s tech columnist The New York Times Kevin Roose sold this Thursday a column in which the phenomenon of NFTs (non-fungible token or cryptographic token) is discussed for over half a million dollars (specifically $ 563,400).

The auction for his column, published on Wednesday, closed on Thursday at 350 units of the Ether cryptocurrency, which at today’s exchange rate equates to that sum.

The article itself was dedicated to the initiative of the columnist, who intended to test the market and broaden the scope of digital works sold under the “NFT” label.

NFTs are digital assets that, thanks to blockchain technology, are recorded as unique, irreplaceable and whose transaction history can be traced from the origin of the work.

This blockchain application has been a revolution in the digital art world, since a creator can register his work as unique and a buyer can certify both its authenticity and ownership of the work. In fact, a few days ago, American artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold a digital work for just over $ 69 million at auction house Christie’s.

NFTs open the door to a myriad of applications in the creation, exchange and transfer of unique digital content and collectible assets around the world with a relatively low cost (minting work and closing transactions on the blockchain has a variable computational and issuance cost).

Roose announced on Twitter that all the money raised during the auction on the crypto art platform Foundation It will be donated to the Neediest Cases Fund for the most disadvantaged, created by the newspaper in 1911.

The New York Times This is not the first medium to sell an NFT digital collectible. The press agency Associated press has auctioned for $ 180,000 a digital work showing the electoral map of the elections last November in the United States.

British public television BBC started trading character images from the Doctor Who and Quartz series as NFT, and recently sold an item for $ 1,800.

The possibilities of this new collectibles market have led the NBA to sell a video of Lebron James for more than $ 200,000 or that Twitter CEO and founder Jack Dorsey sold the network’s first tweet for $ 2.9 million.

Another of the markets that is starting to emerge with NFTs is properties in the metaverse, virtual worlds. Last week, a digital home was sold for half a million dollars.

With information from AFP and EFE

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