Twitter CEO cashes in on NFT tweet
By the numbers: Jack Dorsey Tweet NFT — over 5,000% increase in Google search volume.
The mania over non-fungible tokens (NFTs) continues to sweep the world of entertainment and digital media, and Jack Dorsey — the billionaire founder and CEO of Twitter — is the latest to cash in by trying to sell his first-ever tweet as an NFT. Dorsey’s 2006 tweet from his personal account is being sold on the Valuables platform, which allows the sale of tweets from original creators by tokenizing them into NFTs. Twitter’s terms of service state that users retain rights to any content submitted, posted or displayed on Twitter.
- The auction for the tokenized tweet from “@jack” — which says: “just setting up my twttr” — ends on March 21. Dorsey says he plans to convert the proceeds to bitcoin and donate the sum to the East African nonprofit GiveDirectly’s Africa Response Impact Fund, which provides cash aid to impoverished families in Kenya, Rwanda, Liberia and Malawi.
- The highest bid so far — US$2.5 million — belongs to Sina Estavi, CEO of Bridge Oracle, a public oracle system that is soon to launch its mainnet on the TRON network, whose CEO, Justin Sun, also made headlines by bidding US$2 million.
- In music, the rock band Kings of Leon’s new album “When You See Yourself” were sold as NFTs in an auction conducted by blockchain company YellowHeart, generating over US$2 million. Six of the NFTs come with limited-edition vinyl records and front-row seats to all the Grammy Award-winning band’s future concerts.
- In sports, the National Basketball Association, which has rung up sales of over US$230 million so far through Dapper Labs’ NBA Top Shot NFT platform for buying and selling NBA-authorized video clips of its players in action, is keen to make greater use of blockchain technology. The NBA’s new Blockchain Advisory Subcommittee — which includes billionaires such as Dallas Mavericks’ owner Mark Cuban and Brooklyn Nets’ owner Joe Tsai — will explore how blockchain could be used in other parts of the league’s businesses, such as ticketing and merchandise sales.
Forkast.Insights | What does it mean?
Let’s get one thing straight. Non-fungible tokens are illiquid by nature, not designed or meant to be speculative. The value of NFTs is intrinsically and directly tied to the very platform they are being appraised on. The community, the platform, the entity itself is of value. Not unlike a company for which its overall value lies in shares of that company. In that way, NFT is only the digital store of that perceived value, and tradeable.
Dorsey’s foray into the digital collectible world is a remarkable one for myriad reasons. Twitter has transformed how we communicate, how we politic, how we engage on a global level, whether we like it or not. To own the very first tweet might be like owning bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto’s first genesis block, or block 0, were that ever to be for sale. In a world that is increasingly becoming digital, these are artifacts of the age in which we’re living now.
