Jack Dorsey is known by many to be the CEO of Twitter, and just recently, Dorsey sold his first ever tweet made on the platform for a cool $2.9 million. But wait, how do you sell a tweet? This tweet was sold as an NFT, or a nonfungible token, where according to Dorsey, the proceeds will be converted to bitcoin and then donated to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund.
Some of you might have heard the term NFT used these days and might be wondering what it is. Like we said, NFTs stand for nonfungible token and what it is is basically a way for people to buy and sell digital items. These digital items can be unique, like music or artwork, and the ownership of an item is kept track through blockchain, the same technology behind cryptocurrency like bitcoin.
However, what makes NFT different is that each NFT is different from another. For example, you can exchange a dollar note for another dollar note and you would lose nothing in the process. That would be an example of a fungible item. However, if you look at items like trading cards, a trading card featuring one player is not necessarily worth the same as another player, and that would be an example of a nonfungible item, even though technically they are considered to be the same item.
By using blockchain, it allows people to see who the previous owners of the item were. So far, memes such as Nyan Cat and the “deal with it” sunglasses have been put up for auction as NFTs.