NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have dominated financial headlines recently, the most recent news being that HMRC had seized three of them for the first time ever last week, as well as a trademark filing by the New York Stock Exchange referring to an “online marketplace” for digital assets.
According to research from Syz Group's head of trading Valerie Noël, NFT sales hit $25bn in 2021 compared to $95m in 2020. But what NFTs are, and their potential impact on the economy and markets, remain a mystery to many investors. NFTs are a unique digital token that contain a small amount of code. They seek to create a simulacrum of physical scarcity and uniqueness onto digital objects. The technology began in 2015 as part of the Ethereum blockchain. As well as being able to track the Ether cryptocurrency, the blockchain could track arbitrary blocks of data that can contain a smal...
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