A new era of auctioneering — and what is considered “valuable” — has been ushered in by none other than the Twitter CEO.
According to Yahoo News, Jack Dorsey posted a tweet to “Valuables @Cent” for auction. Valuables @Cent bills itself as “an online marketplace for Tweets where investors or collectors can buy and sell tweets autographed by their creators.”
The Twitter CEO is now $2 million richer thanks to the auction.
But there’s more to this “Tweet auction” than meets the eye. For one, the investor isn’t buying the Tweet per se. Rather, he or she is buying a digital certificate that authenticates the tweet as valid and coming from the purported account.
What makes this valuable, then, is the legitimacy of the comment. In a world filled with doctored images and fake tweets, having a digital certificate of authenticity is, indeed, priceless.
Second, and most importantly, this auction by the Twitter CEO is ushering in the era of the NFT. The NFT, or non-fungible token, is a blockchain-backed certificate that guarantees the authenticity of the digital media. It’s currently being used by entertainment companies such as the NBA, but its use will certainly expand outside the realm of the entertainment industry in short order, to be sure.
