The NFT News

EA and Nike have just announced a partnership that will bring select virtual assets created by .Swoosh, Nike’s Web3 marketplace platform, to future EA Sports titles. No specific games have been mentioned, and neither company has provided much information regarding what we can expect, though the creations will include virtual footwear and apparel.

But the partnership with EA seems to fulfill promises laid out by Nike back in November when the shoe brand first launched .Swoosh. At that time, Nike suggested that its virtual apparel could eventually be equipped in video games and “other immersive experiences.”

It’s been more than a year since NFT sales peaked — and then collapsed — but that’s not stopping enterprising multi-billion dollar corporations from trying to get in on the action.

Starbucks launched its first paid collection of NFTs today, a group of 2,000 digital “stamps,” each priced at $100. Starbucks calls its NFTs “Journey Stamps,” a less technical-sounding term that the uninitiated might use as a way to explain what they just spent money on. And people did buy them — CoinDesk reports that the “stamps” sold out in under 20 minutes.

Coinbase has accused Apple of forcing it to remove NFT transfers from its Wallet app on iOS. On Thursday, it tweeted that Apple “blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature” because the iPhone maker wanted the blockchain fees associated with an NFT transfer to go through its in-app purchase system, giving it a 30 percent cut.

According to Coinbase, it’s impossible to make that happen for a variety of reasons, with one important one being that Apple’s system doesn’t support paying in crypto.

There’s nothing like an explosion of blockchain news to leave you thinking, “Um… what’s going on here?” That’s the feeling I’ve experienced while reading about Grimes getting millions of dollars for NFTs or about Nyan Cat being sold as one.

In the year since NFTs exploded in popularity, the situation has only gotten more complicated. Pictures of apes have sold for tens of millions of dollars, there’s been an endless supply of headlines about million-dollar hacks of NFT projects, and corporate cash grabs have only gotten worse.

It has been less than a year since NBA Top Shot served as an introduction for many sports fans into the world of NFTs, and now the NFL is lining up a similar arrangement. In September, the league announced a partnership with the company that runs Top Shot, Dapper Labs, and now we know the name of the service that will distribute the video highlight clips that make up the “Moments” that become NFTs: NFL All Day.

This effort is separate from the Ticketmaster-powered NFTs that the NFL is tying to selected games this season (like the Lions’ annual Thanksgiving appearance on national TV), but launching the branding now doesn’t feel like a coincidence. There will be many blockchain and NFT discussions amongst family members on Thursday, between these NFL promotions and even the Macy’s parade.

Today, let’s talk about the latest project from a co-founder of Vine and what it tells us about how the tech industry is evolving. This is a rare tech story where basically every fact of it has surprised me on some level. And while some of the ideas here are way out there — to the point that I’m imagining many of you slamming your laptops closed to avoid hearing any more — the far frontier they represent appears to be inching closer to the mainstream every day.

When I wrote in March about non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, I tried to dazzle you by rattling off some of the more impressive sales numbers from the time: $600,000 for the Nyan Cat meme, $5.8 million for artwork by Grimes, $230 million in lifetime sales for NBA Top Shot.

The NFT space continues to be weird and occasionally wonderful, but today’s story is going for some sort of award: a collector paid over $300,000 in Ethereum for an NFT from someone claiming to be Banksy after the image appeared on the famed street artist’s website. Then, Banksy’s spokesperson said that the artist had no involvement with NFTs, and stories came out declaring it a fake. Finally, the NFT’s seller spontaneously refunded the collector, seemingly with no note. Oh, and to really muddy the waters, the collector who bought the NFT goes by the name of Pranksy.

Pranksy told the BBC that he heard about the auction, which was being held on the NFT marketplace OpenSea, from someone in his Discord. (The BBC doesn’t identify Pranksy by name, but he has since revealed that he purchased the NFT, which is verifiable on his OpenSea page.) It seemed legit, as the seller had posted a link to a page on Banksy’s official website, at https://banksy.co.uk/nft.html, which the Wayback Machine confirms existed. The page showed a picture of the NFT being sold, which depicts a Cryptopunk-esque person smoking in front of industrial smokestacks.

David DeVore was seven years old in 2008 when a trip to the dentist left him feeling “funny” afterward. His dad, David Sr., recorded his son’s post-anesthesia musings (“Is this real life?” “You have four eyes” “I feel funny”), and when he uploaded it to YouTube a few months later — intending to share it with friends and family — the video went viral within a few days.

Now, 140 million views and 11 years later, David After Dentist is becoming the latest mid-2000s meme to go up for auction as an NFT.

Two Coinbase employees have managed to find a heartwarming use for NFTs by incorporating them into their wedding, exchanging the digital tokens as part of the ceremony.

Rebecca Rose and Peter Kacherginsky say that alongside their traditional Jewish ceremony, the couple also sent each other digital tokens as “virtual rings” to each other. In a Twitter thread about the wedding, Rose said that their virtual rings now exist on the blockchain “for all to see as proof of our commitment to each other.”

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are big business now, at least for the moment. Everything from one of Creepy Chan’s first Myspace posts to a New York Times article has been put up for sale. (The Times piece went for the Ether equivalent of $560,000.) But they weren’t always a speculative, suspiciously scammy garden. In fact, according to Glitch CEO Anil Dash in a new piece in The Atlantic, the whole thing started as a project kludged together for a hackathon that brought artists and technologists together.

It all started in May 2014, Dash writes, when he was paired up with the digital artist Kevin McCoy. “This was around the peak of Tumblr culture, when a raucous, wildly inspiring community of millions of artists and fans was sharing images and videos completely devoid of attribution, compensation, or context,” Dash writes. A solution to that problem became the seed of their idea. “By the wee hours of the night, McCoy and I had hacked together a first version of a blockchain-backed means of asserting ownership over an original digital work. Exhausted and a little loopy, we gave our creation an ironic name: monetized graphics.”

Atari, the corporate entity / brand of Theseus, has just made around $110,000 by selling —you guessed it — NFTs (shout out to Ars Technica for doing the math). The tokens in question are 3D models of the Atari 2600 game cartridge for Centipede — 10 of them black, 100 of them red.

The NFTs are being sold as part of the Atari Capsule Collection — which is basically a bunch of Centipede and Pong-themed NFTs being sold by the company that now owns the Atari brand. The company and its intellectual property have been bought and sold so many times it’s almost hard to keep track, but the current incarnation of it is mainly known for trying to build hotels and struggling to make a game console.

On February 22nd, Jesse Schwarz set an official NBA Top Shot record by buying the most expensive Moment on the platform. The 31-year-old paid $208,000 for a massive LeBron James dunk, in which he leaps over the Sacramento Kings’ Nemanja Bjelica to authoritatively slam the ball through the hoop. 

Now, you can go onto YouTube and watch a clip of this dunk. A clip of the Moment is even included in the celebratory NBA Top Shot tweet announcing Schwarz’s acquisition. But you won’t own it. 

Virtual band Gorillaz’s debut album is turning 20 years old today (a fact I’m going to try to immediately forget), and in celebration the group will be carrying out the usual anniversary celebrations: re-releasing albums, selling new merch and, according to NME, selling NFTs.

This news has Broken me.

The New York Times has entered the NFT game, selling the chance to own “the first article in the almost 170-year history of The Times to be distributed as an NFT” — and it’s sold for right around $560,000. While the Paper of Record isn’t the first brand (or even the first news organization) to sell one of the digital tokens, it’s certainly been one of the more successful.

The auction for the NFT was announced in a column by Kevin Roose, which acts as both an NFT explainer and a sales pitch for why someone should buy the article. The author is also able to talk about what the process of actually minting an NFT and putting it up for auction is like.

Open up the $69 million NFT that Beeple sold at Christie’s, and you won’t find much. The name of the artwork isn’t there. The name of the artist is missing. And crucially, you won’t even find the actual piece of art.

That’s not a flaw in Beeple’s NFT — it’s just how the system works.

Beeple has been one of the biggest names in NFTs, likely because some of his artwork has sold for truckloads of money. So it was really only a matter of time before someone came along with a tool that lets you create Beeple-like artwork without having to download and pose assets yourself.

(NFT? WTF? If you’re lost, here’s our NFT guide.)

After it spent just over two weeks on the market, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has sold his first tweet as an NFT for the weirdly specific figure of $2,915,835.47. The winning bidder was Sina Estavi, who had held the high bid since offering $2.5 million on March 6th. He upped his bid to this number at the last moment (and if anyone can tell us what that figure represents, we’d love to hear your theories).

Dorsey put the tweet up for digital auction as an NFT — non-fungible token — a digital good that lives on the Ethereum blockchain, on March 5th. Bids were handled on a platform called Valuables by Cent that lets people make offers on tweets that are “autographed by their original creators.”

“The world has gone terminally insane,” Monty Python’s John Cleese told Vanity Fair on the topic of getting into NFTs. So naturally, the comic actor known for silly walks is now selling a ludicrously expensive NFT of his own: a Vonnegut-esque drawing of the Brooklyn Bridge made on an iPad Pro. It’s listed on OpenSea and the auction ends in 10 days.

Bidding started at $100 and has now made its way up to nearly $36,000. Cleese won’t let his masterpiece go for that cheap, though. Cleese said he wants $69.3 million for the piece, suggesting the illustration won’t sell unless someone bids at least that much.

Time is the latest brand to jump on the NFT craze, with auctions for three magazine covers — including its iconic 1966 front page asking, “Is God Dead?” A more recent spin on the cover, “Is Truth Dead?” from 2017, is also up for auction, as is a brand-new “cover” that’s not actually appearing on the magazine: “Is Fiat Dead?” — a phrase that sounds like catnip for the type of crypto enthusiasts likely to bid on these things.

The three covers are selling on the NFT auction site SuperRare, with bids running through Wednesday evening. A minimum price of 10 Ether, or close to $18,000 USD, has been set for each cover. The “Fiat” cover is already at double that as of press time.

If you want to buy Jack Dorsey’s first tweet, you’d better get your bid in. The billionaire co-founder and CEO of Twitter put the tweet up for digital auction as an NFT —non-fungible token— a digital good that lives on the Ethereum blockchain. Dorsey’s 15-year-old tweet is up for sale on a platform called Valuables by Cent that lets people make offers on tweets that are “autographed by their original creators.”

On Sunday afternoon, the high bid for Dorsey’s tweet, the succinct “just setting up my twttr,” was at $2.5 million, from Sina Estavi, CEO of Bridge Oracle.

The artist Derek Laufman woke up last weekend to a couple emails from his followers, who had a question for him. They wanted to know if he’d started selling NFTs — non-fungible tokens — of his art. But it wasn’t just email. People had DMed him on Instagram and Twitter, too. “I just replied, that’s 100 percent not me,” Laufman says when I reach him by video call.

On Rarible, a site where people can purchase NFTs, a verified profile had appeared that alleged to be from him — which means that someone took the time to impersonate him all the way through the platform’s verification process. “I was basically kind of annoyed that somebody had, quote, unquote, verified me as on that platform,” Laufman says. “I dealt with having my art stolen for years. And I’m sort of numb to that. But when somebody is claiming to be you ... that kind of, you know, pisses me off.”

Yes, the brands are truly at it again: Charmin is selling its own, toilet paper-themed NFTs, which, of course, it’s branding as NFTP (non-fungible toilet paper).

The NFTs even come with a “physical display,” in case you want to “hang your NFTP in your bathroom alongside your IRL rolls.” No, actually, I wouldn’t want to do that — especially if it’s a screen that’s showing one of the flashing, glitchy GIFs that switch between showing a roll of toilet paper and the brand’s bear mascots. That would just be distracting.

I get it — despite all the warnings about climate change, you or someone you know has big Scrooge McDuck-sized dollar signs in their eyes after realizing a pinch of blockchain is all you need to turn a JPG image into cold hard cash, and now you’re casting about for something — anything — to turn into an NFT while the initial gold rush lasts.

Then, you spot it: something that doesn’t exactly belong to you. You’re not going to sell that, right? And yet that’s kinda what indie game developer Jason Rohrer is attempting to do, according to Kotaku: sell NFT copies of 155 digital paintings that he originally commissioned for his game The Castle Doctrine as individual artworks online. Which... I mean maybe he’s legally got the rights, even though NFTs didn’t exist back then?