One of the most watched videos in the history of YouTube disappeared on the 23rd of May and got set to be sold at an auction as a work of NFT.
Charlie Bit Me video captured the hearts of all who saw it. It was uploaded 14 years ago and has been viewed 881 million times. The protagonists are three-year-old Harry and one-year-old Charlie. Rumor has it that the two brothers spent a joyful day playing in the garden, after which Harry, for reasons unknown, decided to put his finger in Charlie’s mouth; the rest, as they say, is history.
Cut to 2021, Charlie and Harry have grown up and are about to embark on a new journey of their viral video. The two brothers plan to auction their viral video as an NFT.
The World of Non-fungible Tokens
Non-fungible tokens are digital assets that represent ownership of virtual items – they act as a certificate of authenticity for photos, videos, drawings, audios, or for that matter, any kind of digital files.
The ownership of getting recorded on a blockchain network points to the same technology which supports cryptocurrencies like bitcoin. The Charlie Bit Me video will be recorded and sold on the Ethereum blockchain.
The auction is set to be held on the 22nd of May, and on the 23rd of May, the video will be permanently deleted from YouTube. The buyer will become the sole owner and will also get a chance to reenact it along with the stars themselves. This is not the first time a meme video is being sold in the NFT format.
Non-fungible tokens are actually virtual asset ownership that lets you have total ownership of a thing without having to own it physically. You can see the trend rising in the form of Elon Musk’s famous tweet getting famous through getting auctioned and NFL video sections getting auctioned among fans. We see that whatever be the case, the future stands bright for NFTs. People like looking for new options for investing, and cryptocurrencies such as non-fungible tokens stand as the trend as the best thing that we have come to see in the recent world.
The Future of Videos for NFTs
Videos like these got sold for thousands of dollars. For instance, Mr. Sundaressan, a blockchain entrepreneur, recently paid 69.3 million dollars for digital artworks in the form of NFTs. His idea is to build this industry because he thinks if this NFT industry is successful, that means it will open up this whole new world for a lot more artists and a lot more collectors.
How big is the NFT market? Now, really taking into account the most recent transactions, it’s worth billions of dollars. Last month, two images created on the Crypto Punk platform were sold for 7.3 million dollars each. This means anyone can create an NFT. Any internet user can go to a dedicated platform to upload any file they want to convert into an NFT.
The Future for Digital Art
The fee charged is usually less than 30 dollars per file. Once your file is on the platform, you can sell it. You can also set a percentage you want from all future sales of the file. The owner of the first NFT art gallery in New York offers a good explanation of why this technology could be the future.
The NFTs allow for artist royalties, and that’s the most important thing about all of this. So, if everyone gets involved and everyone takes this seriously, this can help keep the work of the artists sustainable.
Final Word
Viral videos like Charlie Bit my Finger and a dozen others can get sold in thousands of dollars – now artists and digital creators can become famous overnight – all thanks to non-fungible tokens. The future of non-fungible tokens is bright considering the new concept of virtual concept and the element of scarcity and a new algorithm that comes along with it. More and more people are looking forward to investing in this new form of cryptocurrencies and are hoping to build assets to the next level – especially digital artists and artists of all other kinds.
