NFTs can be used to represent ownership of a digital or physical asset; for example, CryptoKitties is an Ethereum game in which each digital collectible kitten is represented with a unique NFT token. NFTs can also be used to represent a piece of digital art, that is unique and non-fungible. 2019, Jitendra Chittoda, Mastering Blockchain Programming with Solidity, Packt Publishing Ltd, →ISBN, page 216:
“Everydays” was the first purely digital NFT sold by Christie’s, and it offered to accept payment in Ethereum, another first for the 255-year-old auction house. 2021 March 11, Scott Reyburn, “JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
The Winklevii rode the cryptocurrency wave to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index and are bullish on NFTs. They ask why collecting digital art should be any different from collecting rare baseball cards. 2021 February 17, Mickey Rapkin, “‘Beeple Mania’: How Mike Winkelmann Makes Millions Selling Pixels”, in Esquire:
Luckily, MSNBC reported in May that NFTs are in low demand and high supply, which means the entire non-fungible market is non-fungibly funged up. 2022 July 25, Ana Valens, “I Can’t Get Over VTuber Ironmouse Making Fun of NFTs”, in The Mary Sue:
To detractors, Rosanna McLaughlin wrote in the Guardian, the makers of NFTs were “morally bankrupt, environmentally vandalistic money-grabbers whose creations barely qualify as art”, a view shared by Beeple himself who described the work as “a big pile of ass-shit”. […]“Prices, not ideas, dominate.” This meant that when the bubble burst—it was reported in 2023 that 95% of NFTs were worthless—nothing at all remained. 2025 September 28, Rachel Aroesti, “In an era of AI slop and mid TV, is it time for cultural snobbery to make a comeback?”, in The Guardian, →ISSN:
Forms
Spelling
Features
Labels
Source
NFTs
Number=Plur
lexicographic
NFT en · PROPN
Meanings
(Australia, abbreviation, alt-of, initialism) Initialism of Norfolk Island Time.
(neologism, transitive) To associate a non-fungible token (NFT) with.
Typically, the art object that gets NFT’d is a digital file — maybe a JPEG image or an MP4 video — that lives on some hard drive, and that looks or sounds precisely the way it would have in the decades before NFTs came along. 2022 March 3, Blake Gopnik, “One Year After Beeple, the NFT Has Changed Artists. Has It Changed Art?”, in The New York Times: