Blockchain news can leave you scratching your head and wondering, "Um... what's going on here?" Reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or Nyan Cat being sold as one has given me that impression. And just when we all thought we figured it out, Twitter's founder put an autographed tweet up for auction as a non-traditional collectible.

The headlines about people paying house money for rock clip art persist even now, months after we first published this explainer, and my mother still has no idea what an NFT is.

Inquiring minds want to know: what exactly is an NFT?

Having spent hours poring over books and articles, I think I've figured it out. So proud of me.

Let's begin with the fundamentals:

WHAT EXACTLY IS AN NFT? WHAT DOES THE LETTER NFT STAND FOR?

Token that is not fungible and have unique identifying codes. NFTs create digital scarcity , in essence.

That doesn't make it any clearer, unfortunately.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be complex. In a nutshell, "non-fungible" refers to the fact that it is unique and cannot be replaced with something else. If you trade one bitcoin for another Bitcoin, you'll end up with exactly the same thing, as is the case with other cryptocurrencies.

A one-of-a-kind trading card, on the other hand, is not transferable. The outcome would be completely different had you exchanged it for a completely different card.

Your reward for giving up a Squirtle was a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner baseball card, which StadiumTalk refers to as "the Mona Lisa of baseball cards."

What is the mechanism by which NFTs operate?

At a high level, the majority of NFTs are a component of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, similar to bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain technology also supports these non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which store additional information that allows them to function differently than, for example, an Ethereum coin.

It should be noted that other blockchains are capable of implementing their own versions of NFTs as well. (Some have already done so.)

What items are worth picking up at the NFT grocery store?

NFTs can be anything digital (for example, drawings, music, or your brain being downloaded and turned into an artificial intelligence), but much of the current excitement revolves around the potential for using the technology to sell digital art.

You're referring to people who pay me for my good tweets, right?

I don't believe anyone will be able to stop you, but that isn't exactly what I meant. A lot of the discussion revolves around NFTs as the next step in the evolution of fine art collecting, but with digital art as the medium.

For the record, when we came up with the line "buying my good tweets," we were trying to come up with something so ridiculous that it wouldn't be considered real life. In response, the founder of Twitter sold one for slightly less than $3 million just a few days after we published the article.

And according to its creator, Dapper Labs, the NBA's Top Shot product is a blockchain-based trading card system that has generated more than $230 in gross sales since its launch. Someone even sold NFT video clips, which are simply clips from a video that you can watch whenever you want on YouTube, for up to $20,000.

If something becomes as popular as art collecting, does anyone truly believe it?

I'm sure some people are hoping as much as they can — for example, the person who paid nearly $390,000 for a 50-second video by Grimes or the person who paid $6.6 million for a Beeple video. In fact, one of Beeple's works was auctioned at Christie's, the world-renowned auction house.

Yes, that is where things become a little awkward. You can make as many copies of a digital file as you want, including the digital artwork that comes with an NFT. The first well-known pieces of digital art was created in the 1960s.

NFTs, on the other hand, aims to provide you with ownership of works but the copyright and reproduction rights can be still kept by the original artist. To put it another way, anyone can purchase a Monet print in the physical world of art collecting. The original, on the other hand, can only be owned by one person.

What do you think of the Gucci Ghost, which costs $3,600?

Whoever purchased that Monet will be able to appreciate it as a tangible object. With digital art, a copy is literally as good as the original in terms of quality and detail.

However, the freedom that comes with owning an original digital artist Beeple...

What exactly is the purpose of NFTs?

That is highly dependent on whether you are an artist or a buyer.

I'm a self-taught artist.

First and foremost, I want you to know that I am proud of you. You did a fantastic job. You might be interested in NFTs because they provide a means for you to sell work for which there would otherwise be little demand. In the event that you come up with a fantastic digital sticker concept, what do you plan to do with it?

Also, a feature that can be activated by enabling NFTs is one that ensures that, no matter how popular your work gets, you will still earn a piece of the proceeds from the sale or transfer of the NFT.

I'm a buyer in the market

One of the most obvious benefits of purchasing art is that it allows you to financially support artists you admire, and this is especially true for non-profit organizations (which are way trendier than, like, Telegram stickers).

In addition to basic usage rights, such as the ability to post the image online or set it as your profile picture, purchasing an NFT usually entails some financial risk. Plus, of course, there are the bragging rights that come with owning artwork and having a blockchain entry to prove it. Programming residing on the blockchain is what we mean by a "smart contract."

No, I was referring to the fact that I am a collector.

Yes, that's correct. NFTs can function similarly to any other speculative asset in that you purchase it in the hope that the value of it will increase one day, allowing you to sell it for a profit.

So, every NFT is an unique?

In the dull, technical sense that every NFT is a one-of-a-kind token on the blockchain, this is true. It could be like a van Gogh painting, in which there is only one definitive actual version, or it could be like a trading card, in which there are 50 or hundreds of identically numbered copies of the same artwork available for purchase.

What Exactly Do You Get When You Purchase a Real Estate Non-Financial Transaction?

For now, the legality of NFT home sales is unclear, but it could be the next stage in cryptocurrency's spread into real estate.

With the rise of cryptocurrency as a mainstream currency, luxury real estate has felt the effects, with developers attempting to garner attention by listing properties for Bitcoin and other digital currencies, and buyers attempting to convert some of their valuable digital assets****into physical real estate. In the same way that physical assets can be owned, NFTs can be bought and sold and their validity verified using the blockchain.