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NFTS – What Are They? And Are They Sustainable?

tezos and NFT

What is an NFT?

NFT stands for non-fungible token. This means it’s more or less unique and can’t be replaced with anything else. They can literally be anything digital such as music, drawings, and your brain downloaded and turned into AI. A lot of the current excitement surrounding them is about the tech used to sell it.

I suppose you could think of it as the new age of “fine art collecting” but in the digital world instead.

They can rack up a tidy sum for digital artists, not long ago, an image sold by Beeple that was auctioned off at Christie’s sold for a whopping 69 million dollars (this is 15 million dollars more than Monet’s painting “Nympheas” that was sold back in 2014). Check out the Top 5 Highest Selling NFTs of all time!

Some slightly unusual examples of art that have been sold as NFTS include articles by The New York Times, digitally animated stickers from musician deadmau5, and an x-ray of William Shatner’s teeth.

Is It Sustainable?

factories with smoke under cloudy sky

Unfortunately, NFTS doesn’t seem to fit into the sustainable category. They are partially responsible for the millions of tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide emissions produced by the cryptocurrencies used to buy and sell them.

Every single aspect of NFTS produces carbon emissions, from minting the tokens to mining the coins to buy them, to resales.

According to researchers, the key reason for this occurring is that most mining takes place in China or the United States, these are both countries that get most of their electricity by burning coal and fossil fuels. They are also the leading countries in e-waste worldwide.