In March last year, just after The Wealth Report was published, the world gasped when somebody paid the equivalent of almost US$70 million in the cryptocurrency ether for the digital artwork you can see on page 84.
It was sold as a non-fungible token, or NFT – not something to hang on the wall, but a chunk of digital data on a blockchain. It was far from a one-off. By the end of 2021, billions of dollars of crypto art had been sold. Collins English Dictionary even made NFT its word of the year.
A sceptic at first, I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that a different generation can value the virtual as highly as the tangible. Millions of young entrepreneurs – my son, barely into his teenage years, has his own range of NFT art – are tokenising anything that moves and creating virtual products such as clothes, guns, cars and handbags that can be worn or used by buyers’ online avatars in the hope of making a quick buck.
Cynics say few of them will make serious money; most of the cash, or should I say crypto, will flow via commissions and fees to the platforms hosting these digital marketplaces.
That’s probably why big tech is so keen to persuade us that we are desperate to live our lives in the metaverse, sometimes described as a hypothetical iteration of the internet as a single, universal virtual world. It sounds dystopian to me, although one of our interviewees (page 9) does hold out hope for digital worlds where users are rewarded for sharing their data or playing games.
What isn’t hypothetical though, as we discuss on page 46, is the amount of money – hundreds of thousands of dollars in many cases – that people are paying for building plots in this embryonic digital ecosystem.
Virtual real estate may sound like a contradiction in terms but, along with NFTs and the metaverse, it’s something I’m sure we’ll be writing a lot more about in future editions of The Wealth Report.
BY: ANDREW SHIRLEY, EDITOR
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