The NFT News

Over the weekend, some users of NFT marketplace Nifty Gateway said hackers stole digital artwork worth thousands of dollars from their accounts. Some people who were hacked also said their credit cards on file were used to purchase additional NFTs, also costing thousands of dollars, which were then transferred away to a hacker’s account.

Nifty Gateway confirmed in a statement to The Verge that some accounts without two-factor authentication had been hacked and that it has been in touch with those affected, but it said it has not seen evidence that its platform was breached. Nifty Giveaway suggests the hackers may have successfully reused login credentials that leaked from other services.

Famed auction house Christie’s just sold its first “purely digital piece of art” for a whopping $69 million. For that price, the buyer got a digital file of a collage of 5,000 images and a complex legacy of greenhouse gas emissions. 

Individual pieces of crypto art, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), are at least partially responsible for the millions of tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions generated by the cryptocurrencies used to buy and sell them. Some artists — including those who have already benefited from the craze — think it’s a problem that can be easily solved. Others think the proposed solutions are a pipe dream.

MetaKovan, the pseudonymous founder of MetaPurse, is the buyer behind the $69 million winning bid for a Beeple NFT at Christie’s yesterday. It was the third-highest sale price ever for a work from a living artist.

“When you think of high-valued NFTs, this one is going to be pretty hard to beat,” MetaKovan said in a statement published by Christie’s. “And here’s why — it represents 13 years of everyday work. Techniques are replicable and skill is surpassable, but the only thing you can’t hack digitally is time. This is the crown jewel, the most valuable piece of art for this generation. It is worth $1 billion.”

Every Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast The Vergecast, our chat show discussing the week in tech news featuring our reporters and editors.

This week, co-hosts Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn talk to Verge deputy editor Elizabeth Lopatto about the rise in interest of NFTs. Elizabeth explains the basics of how NFTs work and what someone actually owns when a transaction takes place.

Until October, the most Mike Winkelmann — the digital artist known as Beeple — had ever sold a print for was $100.

Today, an NFT of his work sold for $69 million at Christie’s. The sale positions him “among the top three most valuable living artists,” according to the auction house.

After selling Nyan Cat as an NFT, its creator, Chris Torres, has found himself working on an even bigger event: a week-long series of auctions where classic memes are being sold on the blockchain by their original creators. Torres calls the event Memeconomy, and he’s hoping it’ll bring both recognition to the meme creators, as well as to the NFT space.

The memes involved should be recognizable if you were on the internet in the early 2010s. They include:

Of course John Legere, the former CEO of T-Mobile, has jumped into NFTs by spending $888,888.88 on one made by Steve Aoki, according to Rolling Stone. It’s nice to know he’s keeping busy after stepping down from T-Mobile’s CEO gig on April 1, 2020.

The NFT in question is called “hairy.” It’s a 36 second-long video, featuring music — which Rolling Stone describes as “soundscapes in harmony with digital animations” and I would describe as “if Darude were making music from inside a Game Boy” — and this visual:

Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey now plans to convert the proceeds from the NFT auction of his first tweet to bitcoin and donate them to charity. The highest bid for the tweet is currently $2.5 million.

The auction will end on March 21st, and he plans to donate the bitcoin to Give Directly, a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to people living in poverty. He’ll be giving the bitcoin to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund for COVID-19 relief.

On Sunday evening, Taco Bell was serving up more than just tacos — it was also delivering NFTs: the fast-food chain tweeted that it was selling taco-themed GIFs and images on NFT marketplace Rarible. Of course, everyone saw that it was a brand hopping on a bandwagon (one that could potentially be detrimental to the environment), and promptly ignored it. No one bought them, and no articles were written.

Just kidding! Taco Bell said that the demand for the NFTs was hot, and that the 25 tokens apparently sold out in 30 minutes. The NFTs are, of course, taco-themed, with four out of the five designs being animated GIFs.

Jack Dorsey, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Twitter, a man who stans bitcoin right on his Twitter bio, is attempting to sell his very first tweet as an NFT — a digital good that lives on the Ethereum blockchain.

You’re probably familiar with the famous tweet, “just setting up my twttr”:

Another iconic meme is going up for auction as an NFT: the text and sunglasses used to popularize “deal with it” GIFs. The auction is being held on the NFT platform Foundation, and bidding is currently at around $8,000, with more than five hours remaining at the time this article was published.

The meme was listed by Ryder Ripps, the designer / creative director / “art prankster” who recently made headlines for falsely claiming to be behind the dystopian redesign of the CIA’s website. (Ripps told The Verge the claim was a joke and “so obvious if you have your cerebral cortex functioning.”)

Grimes is the latest artist to get in on the NFT gold rush, selling around $6 million worth of digital artworks after putting them up for auction yesterday.

A series of 10 pieces — some one of a kind, others with thousands of copies — went up for sale on Nifty Gateway on February 28th. The highest-selling piece was a one-of-a-kind video called “Death of the Old” that involves flying cherubs, a cross, a sword, and glowing light that’s set to an original song by Grimes. The winning bidder took it for nearly $389,000.