Podcast. Buying a $ 2.5 million tweet: the NFT boom

Buy animated gifs, tweets, clips or digital works of art … this is the promise of NFT (non-fungible tokens), which certify the originality of a digital file and allow it to be sold.

Recently, the initial photo of the famous meme Disaster Girl, showing a little girl smiling in front of a burning house, was sold for a sum approaching 500,000 dollars (more than 410,000 euros). Also recently sold were the first tweet published by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, a photo of model Emily Ratajkowski, and very short basketball videos from the NBA. Not to mention the digital artwork of the American Beeple, whose purchaser has paid no less than $ 69.3 million …

Is this a revolution, offering a new economic model to digital creators, or on the contrary, a speculative bubble that will quickly be forgotten? Explanations with Michaël Szadkowski, head of the Pixels section of the World, and Roxana Azimi, journalist at World, specialist in the art market.

An episode produced by Jeanne Boëzec, directed by Matthieu Gasnier and presented by Morgane Tual.

“Time of the World”

“L’Heure du Monde” is the daily news podcast of the World. Listen to a new episode every day from 6 a.m. on Lemonde.fr or on Spotify. Find all the episodes here.

Learn more about NFTs:

Also listen Are streaming platforms going to kill movie theaters?