NEW YORK, June 6 — They are technology enthusiasts on the hunt for opportunities in the Wild West market surrounding NFTs: The popular certified digital objects that have spawned a new generation of collectors convinced of their huge potential.
NFTs have generated nearly US$2.5 billion in sales over the first five months of 2021, based on numbers from the specialized NonFungible website. The big auction houses now regularly sell them, as Sotheby’s is doing through June 10 with its “Natively Digital” sale. Mitchem, a blockchain specialist with Google Cloud, now owns more than 200 NFTs. Like Kang, he has no plans to sell them.
For anyone interested in exploring this new market, Mitchem offers this advice: “Read up on the philosophies behind blockchains like Bitcoin.” That should make it clear, he added, that “these are global computers not owned by a single entity.”Love of art, or money?Those who “flood in the market without doing their research and not even making an effort to understand NFTs,” he said, “will be the ones who will most likely be burned.