Time Magazine, the prestigious publication has released three first-ever NFTs (non-fungible tokens) inspired by one of TIME’s most iconic covers and including an original cover created especially for the auction. The original NFT cover titled “Is Fiat Dead” is inspired by the 1966 edition “Is God Dead?” is a comment on the recent trend of growing popularity of cryptocurrencies at a time when the national Fiat currency of many nations has registered a decline.
NFT mania has gone mainstream as more companies are eager to experiment and cash on the recent trend and TIME has become one of the first mainstream publication to do so. The NFT craze began with digital artist Beeple’s NFT art being sold for $69 million creating not just records but a part of the modern history of art as well as technology.
NFTs became mainstream as early as 2018, however, it has managed to gain traction and several use cases this bull run from artists and celebrities. Earlier NFTs were primarily used as in-game rewards tokens or Fan tokens of popular sports leagues. However, celebrities and modern artists have found a better use case as they are ready to present their art and services via digital tokens. After Beeple, American Footballers including Patrick Mahomes and Rob Gronkowski sold their art collection in NFT for millions of dollars.
NFT Platform Tokens Soaring in the Wake of Recent Hype
The NFT craze has also resulted in many NFT platform’s native tokens soaring to new all-time-highs, some of which have risen by almost 9X over the past couple of weeks. Some of the top NFT tokens to registered new ATH include Einjin ($ENJ), Chillz ($CHZ), and Theta.
While there are many skeptics who have compared the recent surge in NFT popularity to the 2017 ICO era which saw many scams in the wake of rising popularity. Some of the key critics of NFT include popular Bitcoin proponent Max Keiser and Litecoin Founder Charlie Lee.
An NFT is a digital certificate to a collectable that can be easily, cheaply, and perfectly duplicated.
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— Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) March 4, 2021
While it is too early to say whether defi would turn into an ICO era mega scam or something like Defi which despite certain shortcomings have lived up to the hype.
