NFT explained: What is this new digital art selling craze that’s all over TikTok?

TikTok tends to thrust a new trend down our timelines every week,  from feta and tomato pasta recipes to finding out your Netflix wrapped, but the app’s newest trend is worth millions. It’s called NFT art, a form of crypto art embedded in the blockchain that’s taking creative industries by storm. But what exactly are NFTs, and can anyone get involved?

So what is an NFT?

The term NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token, which is a complicated name for what is essentially a digital certificate representing a piece of intellectual property. NFTs are stored on the blockchain, a kind of digital database, and can be bought and sold like cryptocurrencies. However, each NFT represents a unique artwork or piece of media, so they’re not interchangeable with each other, and can be made limited.

Why is NFT art so popular on TikTok?

Well, for one, lots of financial advice and motivational TikTokkers like Gary Vee think NFTs are the digital future of art. More importantly, however, TikTok (and the art world at large) are excited about it because it makes counterfeiting or illegally reproducing art super difficult. Instead of owning a physical copy of an artwork, you own a unique digital representation of it that exists solely within blockchain databases. Theoretically, it’s a great idea, although in reality, owning art only through an ownership certificate sounds… strange.

Who’s making money selling NFT art?

Lots of individual TikTok creators have posted about earning money through NFTs, but the most notable person making money from them is Grimes. Just last week, she sold $5.8 billion in NFT art in just 20 minutes. Her art collection, titled “WarNymph” was sold at an auction that ran for 48 hours on the NFT trading site Nifty Gateway.

Another digital artist, Chris Torres, sold an NFT of the 2011 “Nyan Cat” meme for almost $600,000.

While the concept of the crypto art form may feel too futuristic, there’s no doubt that it can prove to be very valuable. Maybe we’ll all be buying NFTs in the future? Till then, watching TikToks about it will do just fine.

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