2 min read
Newly minted crypto fan Lindsay Lohan is selling a Daft Punk NFT for over $15,000. And while crypto collectibles are designed to be provably authentic, we can't yet determine if this one is the real deal.
NFTs are non-fungible tokens, one-of-one digital items on the Ethereum blockchain, which have become a popular medium for visual art over the past year. Paying for an NFT is essentially paying for publicly-recorded proof of ownership.
Many NFTs are just images online—things that someone might just screenshot and save to a phone. But demonstrable ownership has proved extremely lucrative; in December, the digital artist Beeple sold a collection of digital images for $3.5 million.
Lohan’s piece—a stylized image of the music duo in their robot suits—comes courtesy of a user called “Daft Punk,” who is almost certainly not affiliated with the actual duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (but we’ve asked Rarible for confirmation).
According to records on the NFT marketplace Rarible, this “Daft Punk” user “minted” editions of some Daft Punk NFTs on Sunday (there are only two distinct images, but each has been “minted” into a number of editions, similar to physical prints), then transferred them into the wallets of big name collectors, such as Mark Cuban, Tyga, Soulja Boy, and Beeple.
To be clear, Cuban and co. didn’t pay for these images—the “Daft Punk” account gave them away, presumably in an attempt to boost his cred and juice sales. And most of the accounts haven’t done anything with their newly gifted NFTs, because why would they?
Lohan is the exception: she’s reselling her Daft Punk NFT on the secondary market for 8.8 Ethereum (ETH), or over $15,000, because why wouldn't she?
Also weird: Daft Punk broke up on Monday morning, which suggests that this NFT creator either got very lucky with their timing or somehow knew about the breakup in advance.
There’s also the faint but disturbing possibility that Lohan herself knew about the band's breakup. Stranger things have happened: remember when the Rock knew about the death of Osama Bin Laden before it was announced?
In any case, no one’s biting so far—the highest bid on Lohan’s NFT is currently $88.
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