Whether it’s baseball players or shiny Pokemon cards, collectibles have been a cultural mainstay in human behavior since the Renaissance. Memorabilia from famous films or items of clothing worn by a celebrity can be auctioned and sold for eye-watering amounts. Take the prototype Batmobile from the 1960s Batman TV show, it was sold for $4.2 million. With collectibles, the concept itself is simple: An item has value based on its scarcity. The less of it there is, the more it’s worth.
It is this concept that is the driving principle behind the explosive growth of nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Largely bought and sold on the Ethereum blockchain, NFTs are essentially collectibles that have been digitized. Whether it's the insanely popular and limited CryptoPunk avatars or Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet, NFTs are big money and those who managed to nab a rare NFT will always have proof of ownership, as this data lives in the blockchain.