Decryption“Non-fungible tokens” hit the headlines by allowing the sale of original digital files for record amounts. But precise information on their buyers, which is bathed in the opaque world of cryptocurrencies, remains difficult to obtain.
Tidal wave for some, ephemeral wave for others: “NFT” technology (non-fungible token or “non-fungible tokens”, in French) has been talked about in recent weeks as a new way to monetize all forms of digital objects. Its asset is to inspire confidence: the buyer of an NFT has the certainty that he gets his hands on the original file of its creator (an image, a video, a sound, …), authenticated by a certificate. which guarantees its provenance and ownership.
Mechanisms that explain why the art market, and communities of digital artists, have shown themselves to be particularly permeable to the integration of NFTs into their ecosystem. To the point that the market has quadrupled from 2019 to 2020, according to a report from Nonfungible.com, a specialized media on the subject, before exploding in 2021, according to Cryptoart.io, which compiles the sales of several platforms dedicated to the NFT market.
The most publicized examples of NFT sales involved sometimes unreal sums. The New York Times recently revealed that the initial photo from the “Disaster Girl” meme, showing a little girl smiling alongside a burning house (an image taken, diverted and posted countless times on the Internet since it was first broadcast in 2008), had been sold for an equivalent sum to 410,000 euros.
The sum received by the amateur photographer – the father of the little girl at the time – was paid by a certain “Farzin @ f3Music” on the Foundation platform, April 18. As often, we will not know more about this buyer: even Ben Lashes, an American agent specializing in the marketing of memes, and who orchestrated this sale, does not know it. “I do not know who bought the NFT of the Nyan Cat. », He explains to World, while the original animation of the famous rainbow cat sold for around 530,000 euros thanks to its intermediary.
Equally unknown is the purchaser of the track taken from the album. Ultraviolet by DJ 3LAU paid him 3 million euros. As for the identity of the buyer of the NFT of the artist Beeple, a work that compiles 5,000 drawn sketches in 5,000 consecutive days, it is uncertain, while with a sale price of nearly 50 million euros, it has become the third highest auction made on the work of a living artist.
Technical opacity
The precise identities of the buyers, unless exposed to the light of day, are technically impossible to know. On NFT’s sales platforms often only appear the addresses of cryptocurrency wallets from which the sum necessary to purchase the digital work of art emanated: for the Nyan Cat gif, we see for example that the address “0x7Eb28B2f14A59789ec4c782A5DD957F9C8F33f6b” is the one from which the NFT was purchased. “We generally only know the customer’s virtual wallet number which is used to pay in cryptocurrency”, confirm at World Ben Lashes.
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