You may recall from last year that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey sold the first ever tweet for $2.9 million. Three months later, someone paid $4 million for a version of the popular ‘Doge’ meme. How, though, does anyone sell a tweet or a meme? Given that they were freely available on the internet in the first place, why were they so expensive? Welcome to the complex world of NFTs.
This developing marketplace might be easily dismissed as a fad right now – but it’s gaining traction at such a rate that it will probably be an entirely standard practice by the time the current generation of children are adults. In this week’s #WakeUpWednesday guide, we bring parents and carers the basics – and, of course, the common risks – of non-fungible tokens (NFTs)
Many people – most people, we might venture – still don’t know exactly what non-fungible tokens are, or indeed how they work: but they are steadily becoming a part of mainstream life. In early 2022, for example, Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs seized non-fungible tokens as assets for the first time when they acted against a suspected VAT fraud scheme. Indeed, wherever such significant sums of money are changing hands in cyberspace, online criminals will gather in anticipation of a dishonest – and sizable – profit. Our #WakeUpWednesday guide this week outlines the basics of NFTs – what they are, how’re they’re traded, and what tricks scammers frequently employ to try and part the unwary from their money.
