What are NFTs, this acronym that drives the art world crazy?

I like cows. Animals, of course. I like the lazy women who watch the trains go by and the hardworking women plowing the fields in Rosa Bonheur's paintings. Unfortunately for me, the former are not very popular in Paris and the latter cost around 400,000 euros. But recently, by chance, I met the perfect cow, a ruminant with a blue coat and a muzzle verging on purple whose gaze is at once intelligent, affectionate and languorous. Her father, Alex Shell, a Russian computer scientist, explains that he spawned her using only computer code, which makes her a 100% digital creature. When I discovered this Art Cow – that’s its nickname – on the Internet in the form of a non-fungible token, neither one nor two, I bought it for the modest sum of 0.001 ether.

To those who would be puzzled by this last sentence: we'll come back to it, we promise, but if I get into technical considerations right away, I'm going to lose people on the way. At this point, it is enough to know that NFT technology makes it possible to identify and trace a supposedly artistic digital object (in the very, very broad sense of the term).

Ha ha, you are probably laughing, why buy an image available on the Internet? Anyone can take a screenshot and look at it at their leisure. It's just. But the real owner of the psychedelic heifer, the one and only, is me. If you don't believe me, check on the KnownOrigin marketplace, you will see that it belongs to a certain Sissi29, who is none other than my avatar. And if you ever like it, do not hesitate to make a proposal. I adore it, my ruminant, but the Peggy Guggenheim that lies dormant in me must sometimes agree to part with a masterpiece to expand its collection.

At the origin of my budding vocation as a digital collector, there is the discovery of a galaxy whose borders the Guardian and the New York Times have begun to explore in recent months. They seemed so fascinated, my Anglo-Saxon colleagues, that I wanted to venture there after them. Result: I spent my month of August wandering around in a country so breathtaking that I am no longer very sure where I live. Not even if I'm still real.

Because there, on the NFT planets, people don't seem to be surprised by anything. A 12-year-old Londoner, Benyamin Ahmed, earns 340,000 euros selling pixelated images of whales he created on software instead of doing his homework? What's more normal ! Tennis player Oleksandra Oliynykova sells her forearm and sees it tear off (digitally of course, we're not in a gore movie) for 5,200 euros? We applaud the stroke of genius! Knowing that the Croatian is sailing in the zone of the 600th world, I have no advice to give to Novak Djokovic but if I were him, I would study the question. Elon Musk, the boss of Tesla, decides to recycle his old tweets in NFT? Buyers rush in and one of them offers nearly a million euros for this anthology text: "NFT for your pride. Computers never sleep. It's verified. It's guaranteed! Even Musk felt enough was enough, and he eventually backed out of the sale. Perhaps he had discovered, in the meantime, steeped in shame, that a missive sent by a certain Napoleon to Grand Marshal Duroc to invite him to his coronation on the "eleventh day of the month of Frimaire next" (a real paper, written in pen and that can be framed and put on the fireplace) painfully reached 3,800 euros in an auction. However, the language there was otherwise flowery: "We give you notice of it by this letter, desiring that no legitimate impediment opposes our being accompanied by you on this solemnity. »