3 Themes Surface in the 2021 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

Earlier this year, Christie's announced two major firsts for an auction house: It would accept cryptocurrency, and it would offer for sale a purely digital work backed by a unique nonfungible token (NFT). The work, by digital artist Beeple, sold for more than $69 million. It forms part of an entirely new means of monetization -- and potentially a whole new digital ecosystem. An NFT is a unique blockchain-based digital asset that links to real-world assets like digital art or music and tokenized physical assets like houses or cars. NFTs use immutable public blockchains and, as of last month, had a market valuation greater than $300 million.