If all of this sounds bizarre, that’s because it is. But more and more they are linked to pieces of digital art designed by honest-to-God creators such as Beeple-who, two months ago, sold a token for $777,777 on Nifty Gateway. Some of these NFTs are stand-ins for collectibles in the tradition of CryptoKitties-like Non-Fungible Pepes, a postmodern bid to reclaim the meme frog from the alt-right others are objects intended to be used in video games. On online platforms such as Rarible, OpenSea, and Nifty Gateway (backed by twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss), people are shelling out big sums of cryptocurrency and legal tender to buy tokens representing ownership of digital objects, which are then often reauctioned at higher prices. One recent report by, a company releasing market insights on NFTs, says that in 2020, NFT trading was worth over $250 million, an increase of almost 300 percent from the previous year.

NFTs are selling like hotcakes, and this time the Ethereum network, which has been upgraded since 2017, is better equipped to deal with the endless sloshing. Cryptocurrency payments were of course accepted. Its end point is an auction that started on Thursday, in which a token associated with a digital collage of 5,000 images by graphic designer Beeple went under the hammer at auction house Christie’s. But the process the goggle-eyed cats set off did not end there. That was eventually solved-and that was, for most people, the last they heard of CryptoKitties. The trading game quickly caught on among the crypto-initiated, so much so that CryptoKitties-related transactions clogged and slowed down Ethereum.

This story originally appeared on WIRED UK.

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