Here are The Drum’s five favorite NFTs (right now)
NFTs have revolutionized the internet – while earning some digital artists a fortune in the process. There are innumerable NFTs out there (and the list is growing by the day), but we’ve narrowed our list of all-time favorites down to five.
We’ve rounded up our favorite NFTs of the last few months
Not so long ago, NFTs were obscure cultural oddities that only your most tech-savvy friends could comprehend. Now they’re seemingly everywhere. In a remarkably short span of time, they’ve redefined the way that our culture thinks about ownership, intellectual property, individuality and artistic expression in the strange and boundless world that is the internet.
For digital artists – long frustrated in their attempts to break into the world of high-scale art collecting – the advent of the NTF market has been an absolute gold mine. Beeple – the world’s most valuable NFT artist – made history when his original NFT artwork, titled The First 5,000 Days, sold for a staggering $69,346,250 back in early 2021.
Some NFTs are dazzlingly complex, others are quite simple. (So simple, in fact, that many of them make you wonder how they could possibly be worth millions of dollars.) The sheer scope of creativity and imagination that’s been displayed via the proliferation of NFTs over the past couple of years is, in and of itself, completely stunning.
It would take far too long for us to walk you through every NFT that has caught our attention recently. So, in order to give you a brief glimpse into the wacky and wildly profitable world of non-fungible tokens, we’ve compiled our top five below. Enjoy!
The source code of the internet
The internet was born in 1989 in the form of thousands of lines of code. Now the author of that incalculably valuable source code – Sir Tim Berners-Lee – has sold his alphanumeric masterpiece for more than $5m. This is one of those NFTs that’s clearly worth its price tag; it’s basically the egg from which the internet was born.
Beeple’s Crossroads
That’s right, Beeple again. This time, he’s created an NFT depicting the massive, naked corpse of former president Donald Trump. The deceased Donald is lying prone in an overgrown field, surrounded by garbage and covered with graffiti. Pedestrians hurry past him on the nearby footpath, not even sparing his body a passing glance. This is certainly one of the more, shall we say, politically inflammatory NFTs to make headlines in recent years. But it’s also, arguably, a significant cultural artifact, something that future historians might study in order to understand just what the hell was going on in the US in 2021. It sold for more than $6m.
Alice, the artificially-intelligent NFT
It was only a matter of time before mad (and opportunistic) scientists came along to merge artificial intelligence (AI) with NFTs. The result of their technological tinkering? Meet Alice, a digital humanoid who lives in an NFT – and who you can actually interact with. Please just be careful what you teach her, we don’t yet know what she’s capable of. Also, what happens if she becomes sentient? Can we live with ourselves knowing that a conscious entity is trapped in a tiny, dark NFT? Hold on, we need to get the screenwriters of Black Mirror on the phone.
This NFT will self-destruct in 10… 9… 8…
The text in this NFT says it all: it was designed to erase itself, basically to self-destruct, if the average global temperature of the Earth surpasses the critical two-degree threshold over pre-industrial temperatures. How does it know when that threshold has been crossed? It’s being fed regular updates from Nasa. All we can say is: genius.
Burnt Banksy
In order to create, you must first destroy. That, or something like it, was apparently the philosophy that inspired Injective Protocol, a blockchain company, to purchase and then burn a $95,000 Banksy original, titled Morons. They filmed the burning, and then sold the video for a lot more than the Banksy piece itself was worth. We can’t wait for someone to film a video of them destroying this NFT and then selling that video for even more, and so on until infinity.