DIGITAL DOLLARS

PARIS HILTON has sold one for more than £800k, John Terry has got into a row with the Premier League about his and Liam Payne is so obsessed he’s created a special Twitter account.

And that’s despite the fact the tokens don’t exist in the real world. Confused? Plenty of people are — but that isn’t stopping them investing, with the global market for NFTs hitting £16.5BILLION last year.

And there is serious money to be made. Digital artwork Everydays — The First 5000 Days, by American artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, was sold by London auctioneer Christie’s for £50million last March.

The buyer said he was getting the NFT “for a steal”. Only real-world works by two other living artists — David Hockney and Jeff Koons — have sold for more

So how did assets that you can only see on a screen become the most hyped investment on the planet?

Once the preserve of geeks, NFTs first appeared in 2012 and are digital certificates of “ownership” of the likeness of an artwork, a video or even a tweet, which are bought with cryptocurrencies, or non-regulated digital currencies. They are stored on a blockchain, or digital ledger.

Fungible means interchangeable, like money — a £10 note can be changed into food, beer, or whatever, whereas an NFT is Non-Fungible, meaning it can’t be changed from the physical asset it represents, such as an artwork.

However, the tokens can be bought and sold like a house or a car, though they don’t exist in the real world, and there is nothing to stop the creation of more NFTs with identical digital files.