This story was originally published in our January/February 2022 issue. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Americans spend more than 11 hours a day online, creating and consuming posts, images, tweets and more. And this year we saw more digital media up for sale than ever before — at record prices — in the form of the non-fungible token (NFT). These digital assets, purchased through cryptocurrency, have been around for nearly a decade, but 2021 made them a global phenomenon.
Non-fungible essentially means “one of a kind” — unlike, say, a dollar bill. Both real and digital cash are fungible; one dollar or one Bitcoin is always worth the same as another dollar or Bitcoin. An NFT, on the other hand, is a unique digitally encoded asset that someone can own and whose value is determined by what buyers are willing to pay. For instance, ...
