Why did a highlight of LeBron James dunking sell for more than $200K?

WINNIPEG (CityNews) – It’s called an NFT: non-fungible token. Some people are making millions of dollars buying and selling them, while others still don’t know what it is.

The simple explanation: NFTs are a non-transferable digital certificate of authenticity. Through blockchain, NFTs are linked to an online medium – an image, a video, a song, etc. – forever proving which version is the original.

Consider this. At an auction, a print of the Mona Lisa would sell for next to nothing compared to the Leonardo da Vinci original. Online art works the same way. While people share copies on social media for free, an NFT means the creator of the digital art can forever prove they have the original. That makes it unique and more sought after.

That originality has some people paying millions of dollars to own one-of-a-kind digital art.

“This absolutely helps creators,” said Tom Keenan, a pioneer in teaching computer security and the author of Technocreep. “First of all, people are making huge amounts of money on their digital art.

“You can take a picture of the Mona Lisa but that doesn’t mean you own the Mona Lisa. The day will come when a contemporary piece of digital art sells for more than a famous painting.”

But that day may have already come. Canadian artist Michah Dowbak recently earned more than $4 million selling his NFT artwork online.

And it’s not just for art. Sports fans are beginning to collect NFTs like digital memorabilia.

The NBA sells “Top Shots,” officially licensed digital collectibles – essentially, highlights – of players that can be purchased by fans and stored on computers. And it’s generating massive amounts of money.

“So the league gets a cut out of that and the trading has topped over $200 million over the past month, so it’s growing exponentially,” said Jahdeep Sidhu, CTO of Blockchain Foundry. “There is a video of LeBron James, a clip of him dunking that went over $200,000.”

Sidhu says the COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the interest in NFTs, and marketplaces are popping up expecting to service billions of people who will be buying and selling everything from art, to real estate, to one-on-one meet and greets with celebrities and athletes.

“You can participate at home on your own without being onboarded into a bank or onboarded into any system,” said Sidhu. “You just start and go on your own.”

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