The Year in Tech, 2023: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

2 HOW NFTs CREATE VALUE

by Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers

Disclosure: Both Kaczynski and Kominers own NFTs, as well as other crypto assets. Additionally, Kominers provides market design advice to a number of marketplace businesses and crypto projects, including Novi Financial, Inc., the Diem Association, koodos, and Quora.

In March 2021, a work of art called Everydays: The First 5000 Days sold for $69 million at Christie’s auction house. It’s not out of the ordinary to see eight-figure art sales, but this one received a lot of attention because the piece was sold as a non-fungible token (NFT)—an electronic record corresponding to an image that lives entirely in the digital world.

Put differently: Someone paid almost $70 million ...