The Future of Your Digital Identity: All About The NFTs? Wednesday, September 7, 2022

The Buzz 1: “NFTs are not just for digital art—and their popularity is growing. Now The Economist is experimenting with an NFT, to raise money for a good cause. – One candidate for the Oxford English Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” for 2021 will surely be “NFT”. Non-fungible tokens—cryptocurrency chits which represent digital images or videos—have been around since 2014, but took off in popularity in March [2021] when Christie’s, a British auction house, sold an NFT of “Everydays—The First 5,000 Days”, art by Mike Winkelmann, for a cool $69m.…On October 25, The Economist will auction off the cover of our issue from September 18: Alice in Wonderland embarking on a journey into the world of decentralised finance (DeFi)—in which NFTs form part of the foundation of the digital economy.” [economist.com] The Buzz 2: “Like it or not, the music industry has embraced NFTs …In March 2021, the album heralded as the first to be released as a non-fungible token was Kings of Leon’s barrel-scraping When You See Yourself—and people who bought the shiny new digital widget got their actual copies of the record as old-fashioned MP3s and vinyl records. Snoop Dogg announced his newly acquired Death Row Records, a hip-hop brand venerable enough for the Super Bowl halftime show, would become the first NFT label." [pitchfork.com] The Buzz 3: “Sotheby's offers a curated array of NFT's from Digital Art, Luxury, Collectibles, Sports and Pop Culture…In 2021, records were broken: the most expensive Bored Ape Yacht Club ever sold in October 2021 for $3.4M…the second most expensive Cryptopunk ever sold achieved $11.7M.” [sothebys.com] Within the next couple of years, some of our favorite establishments or even community groups might start to implement this technology to better interact with us. What kinds of new possibilities will be created with NFTs for both the creator and us, the consumer? We’ll ask Connor Borrego, Amina Touati and James Shannon for their take on The Future of Your Digital Identity: All About The NFTs?