We should qualify that title by saying it is the biggest sale to date, although we still have a few months to go. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the massive price tag for NFTs.com, which was agreed for a cool $15 million.
To put this into some context, it’s not only the biggest sale so far in 2022, but also the second biggest deal for a public domain in history. In case you’re wondering which domain name pipped this one for the top price, it’s Voice.com, which sold for twice that amount in 2019.
NFTs.com will be a fascinating sale for anyone with even a passing interest in cryptocurrencies and blockchain topics. No one knows who bought the NFTs.com and who sold it, so the intention behind the domain remains unclear at this stage. However, the potential is clearly there, given how much the new owner paid to get hold of the domain name.
So… what are NFTs anyway?
It would be logical for the brain to try and think of a string of three words that makes sense of those letters. And you may have heard of non-fungible tokens already, even if only in passing. However, it’s one of those phrases that really doesn’t tell you anything at all unless you already have knowledge of this aspect of online trading.
NFTs.com will surely have a connection with non-fungible tokens – we just don’t yet know quite how this will work. However, it’s important to understand the difference between fungible and non-fungible, and indeed what a token is to start with.
Fungible refers to an item that can be replaced by another identical item. For example, a £5 note is fungible. You could give me a £5 note and I could give you a £5 note, and nothing would have changed. They’re both identical and worth the same (unless a famous artist has chosen to scribble something inspiring on one of them, I suppose).
A non-fungible token, therefore, refers to an item that is unique. A diamond is non-fungible because you cannot simply swap one diamond for another and end up with the same thing.
NFTs have taken on new meaning in the online world too. They’re digital assets, using blockchain technology, and one of the best modern examples of this concerns digital art. There are plenty of NFT marketplaces online today, where people can go and buy digital art. They can’t be copied in the same way regular art can online, and therefore they can retain their value.
So, where does this leave the owner of NFTs.com? Will they launch a new marketplace, striving to become the ultimate destination for those wishing to buy or sell NFTs? We must wait and see. It seems unlikely that the site will end up being nothing more than an informative site, although it could well cover that angle as well. But buying and selling from one of the priciest domain name sales ever, that sounds more likely.