We can't avoid it any longer. Here's a story about the NFT mania... aka someone bought a JPEG for $69m in Ether

NFTs – or non-fungible tokens, a newfangled way to trade virtual assets – truly exploded into the mainstream on Thursday when Christie’s auctioned off its first-ever NFT digital artwork for $69,346,250. Not a typo.

That's perhaps a lot to unpack. An NFT is a unique string of numbers and characters that act as a digital certificate proving ownership of a particular item. The token is published on a blockchain to record this ownership, and the token can be later transferred to another person. The chain of ownership is indelibly reflected in the token's blockchain. The value lies in how much you can sell the token for to the next person.

You can make an NFT for pretty much anything – and ideally something someone wants to pay for. Digital artwork, music, the written word, whatever can be represented as a token. In the case of the $69m artwork: it's a giant JPEG. It's a big picture. Like all NFT assets, it exists outside the blockchain. Someone bought, presumably, the full thing for tens of millions of dollars, and got a token in a blockchain to prove it.

In general, the creator of such NFT works can retain the copyright if they wish. The asset might even already be public, or sold separately like, say, on iTunes. Again, NFTs are a hyped up, cryptographic way of proving you own an official copy of something. Using an append-only log of receipts that consumes a non-trivial amount of energy.

The craze has been bubbling along as celebrities, musicians, and tech moguls made NFTs out of stuff like individual public tweets and albums. It hit another level, though, with the sale of a JPEG file titled "Everydays: The First 5000 Days," deemed to be worth, we say again, $69m (£49.3m) in the cryptocurrency Ether when it was auctioned off this week.

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