Pixel this

When Magnus Carlsen won last year’s Meltwater Champions Tour, they made two trophies. One was for Carlsen, and the second was auctioned online, fetching a sum in digital currency of around $25,000. The trophy only exists as a video showing a stack of rotating gold squares, like a Donald Trump skyscraper from the future.

If you bought it, you’d be right on trend. Earlier in 2021, the winning bid at Christie’s for a digital artwork named ‘Everydays: the First 5000 Days’ came in at $69 million. That was for an elaborate collage created by graphic designer Mike Winkelmann, using the pseudonym ‘Beeple’.

The pixels aren’t worth diddly squat, since anyone can download a copy. But the artwork (like Carlsen’s trophy) was sold in the form of an ‘NFT’ (non-fungible token) registered on a public blockchain. Thanks to cryptography, these tokens can be bought and sold, like a digital certificate of ownership. Unlike the generic pixels, an NFT can be traced back to the person who owns it.