Token Supremacy: The Art Of Finance, The Finance Of Art, And The Great Crypto Crash Of 2022,New

A New York Times investigative reporter wades into the murky, pixelated waters of the multibilliondollar NFT marketthe virtual casino that sprang up overnight in 2020 and came crashing down, with all its celebrity hucksters, just two years later. A vibrant and witty exploration of the increasingly blurry line between art and money, artist and con artist, value and worthlessness.A perfect book to understand and to laugh at the craziness of the art world today.' Jerry Saltz, author of How to Be an ArtistIn 2021, when the gavel fell at Christies on the sale of Mike Winkelmanns Everydays seriesa compilation of five thousand digital artworksit made a thunderous announcement: Nonfungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art marketthe largest unregulated market in the worldput its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide? Was it all just a money laundering scheme? And come on, what was that piece of digital flotsam really worth anyway?In Token Supremacy, Zachary Small works through these and other fascinating questions, tracing the crypto economy back to its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the lineage of NFTs back to the first photographic negatives. Small describes jawdropping tales of heists, publicity stunts, and rug pulls, before zeroing in on the role of 'security tokens' in the FTX scandal. Detours through art history provide insight into the mythmaking tactics that drive stratospheric auction sales and help the wealthy launder their finances (and reputations) through art. And we cast an eye toward a future where NFTs have paved the way for a dangerous, new shadow banking system.A wild and spellbinding tour through a world that strains belief.