Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO’s wife and singer Grimes, earned 6.5 billion won in 20 minutes by auctioning digital paintings with encryption technologies such as bitcoin.
Grimes put his song in the background on a fictional image of a baby angel with wings protecting Mars and put it on an online auction.
These digital artworks drew the attention of online auction participants and sold out soon after speculation that they depicted Musk’s space trip to Mars and a child born between Musk and Grimes.
The digital painting of Grimes is applied with the’NFT’ (Non fungible Token) technology, which is recently gaining popularity in the virtual asset market.
The most expensive piece of art with NFT technology so far is a 10-second video clip created by digital artist Biffle, which sold for $6.6 million (7.4 billion won) last week. An art collector in Florida, USA, bought the clip for $67,000 (75 million won) in October last year, and resold it for a 100-fold increase in just four months.
Like Bitcoin, NFT utilized blockchain technology. However, unlike traditional virtual assets, NFT gave digital assets a separate and unique recognition value.
For example, currently the price per bitcoin is the same. However, when NFT is applied, one coin has a separate recognition value that is’non-replaceable’ from other coins, and the price varies for each coin.
In particular, because NFTs can give virtual assets the value of scarcity and uniqueness, they are rapidly increasing their influence in areas such as digital art and game item trading.
Netizens are enthusiastic about NFT with the belief that they can completely prove ownership of virtual items thanks to blockchain technology.
Corona 19 also played a big role in the NFT boom. Last year, the NFT market grew to $250 million, four times larger than the previous year. With the generalization of office workers working from home, the number of hours they spend on the Internet has increased significantly, and the related market has grown rapidly.
CNBC, an economic channel in the United States, said, “The digital collectibles known as NFTs are exploding in popularity. “From art to sports cards, people spend millions of dollars on digital collectibles.”
However, warnings about the craze are also coming out. Experts are saying, “If the craze subsides, it can cause great losses, and it can be a good opportunity only for scammers.”