NFT Fans Want to Crack the Da Vinci Code
But will the current crop of digital art files survive as long as the Mona Lisa?
Yacht art.
Photographer: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The art world has seen a lot of crazy in the past decade. With trophy assets booming in a low-rate world that drives demand for safe havens, only the clubby world of the super-rich and the brand power of Leonardo da Vinci could turn a $1,000 art-auction bet into the $450 million “Salvator Mundi.”
The digital art world now represents a slice of that excess. Hyped-up cryptocurrency-fueled collectibles, known as non-fungible tokens, are in gold-rush territory: More than $2 billion in NFTs have changed hands in the first three months of 2021, according to NonFungible.com. Bored, wealthy millennials are all too eager to flash their cash online.