NFTs

Tweets as NFTs Beckon a New Frontier in the NFT Market

Things are moving fast – first it was digital art and gaming and now it’s tweets.  The applications of NFTs continue to accelerate with Jack Dorsey’s offering up for bidding of his first tweet ever as an NFT.  Here is the tweet:

just setting up my twttr

— jack (@jack) March 21, 2006
The bidding is on
The highest price bid for the tweet at the time of writing this article was $2.5M and was made by Sina Estavi, the chief executive of Malaysia-based Bridge Oracle, an application built on top of the tron blockchain.

Before that bid, Justin Sun, tron's founder and the chief executive of peer-to-peer file sharing client BitTorrent, made a bid of $2M.  Besides tron and BitTorrent, Sun is famous for winning a $4.5 million lunch with crypto-skeptic Warren Buffett as part of the "Oracle of Omaha’s" annual charity auction for the Glide Foundation.

What are NFTs?
The simplest definition of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs is digital assets that are unique and exist on a blockchain.  In other words, one-of-a-kind collectable items.
 
If you want a more technical definition, you can visit ERC721.org, which describes the coding standards that describe a non-fungible token.
 
NFTs are like digital versions of baseball cards – each card is unique and not interchangeable.  This is unlike a bitcoin or a physical dollar – every individual Bitcoin or dollar bill is the same as any other one. 
 
All about the hype?
A recent Bloomberg opinion piece called NFT art a “geeky implementation of bragging rights.”  This reminds us of the old startup adage that you know you’re onto something when people get dismissive or so one-sided about new tech.  NFTs are not just limited to the digital art or gaming worlds, as this offer of Dosey’s tweet makes clear.
 
Valuables
The platform that is offering the Dorsey tweet is an NFT marketplace that buys and sells tweets.  Valuables will get 5% of the proceeds from the sale of Dorsey's tweet– hmm, that sounds like a good biz.

But it looks like Valuables aspires to be much more than just a marketplace for NFT tweets based on their vision statement:

  • "Using NFTs, Cent replaces an attention-based advertisement model with a community-based financing model, optimizing and securing value in peer-to-peer transactions. Attention will still be abundant, just localized, within communities that work together to generate income. The intent is for creative work to be made from an authentic perspective, not just to gain attention, as its primary audience is an invested community of real fans incentivized to support its growth."
Dorsey is an ardent promoter of Bitcoin – #bitcoin is even in his twitter profile, so could this be a publicity grab for crypto/NFTs?  That seems likely, but whatever the case, the NFT boom is only beginning.

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