Pixelated apes selling for millions of dollars? Pop stars auctioning off ‘parts’ of their body to fans? Priceless artworks that don’t actually ‘exist’? Welcome to the wonderful, confusing, and surreal world of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs.
In the most basic terms, NFTs are digital assets that you can buy, sell, trade, or simply hold. These virtual assets include digital artwork, video clips, gifs, in-game items for computer games, online trading cards, and music.
Even tweets can be minted and sold as an NFT. Iranian crypto entrepreneur Sina Estavi purchased Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first tweet for an eye-watering $2.9million in March 2020. It could go down as one of the worst investments in the digital space – and that’s saying something! In April 2022, Estavi put the NFT up for auction for 14,969 ether, the native crypto token of the Ethereum networks, or about $50 million. He didn’t receive any bids higher than $300. Ouch!
Other NFT projects border on the outright absurd. Toilet paper manufacturer Charmin recently minted a unique collection of digital loo rolls. The toilet paper NFTs are now on sale for $4,000 each, with 99% of money from every sale going toward charitable organisations.
We know that crypto millionaires are willing to plunge their millions into NFTs. But what do the ‘regular’ people around the world think about this new virtual economy? Online finance provider CashNetUSA decided to find out!
CashNetUSA’s researchers analysed data on NFT Google search volume and Twitter sentiment to create maps of the countries that love and hate NFTs. And they added some extra maps highlighting the world’s most in-demand NFTs and NFT platforms.
The maps reveal that people in Singapore have the most interest in NFTs. According to the research from CashNetUSA, there are 18,717 NFT-related Google searches per one million inhabitants in Singapore.
Montenegro is the most NFT-friendly country. Over 80% of all NFT tweets from the Baltic state are positive.
The sentiment is very different in Poland. Nearly a quarter of its NFT tweets are negative, making Poland the biggest NFT hater on the planet.
But you can’t really blame the locals. Poles have witnessed some of the most opportunistic (and some might say exploitative) cash-grabs in the NFT space. Polish singer Doda turned pictures of her ‘intimate’ areas into NFTs. She then put them up for sale for $70,000.
We warned you this was going to get weird!
Find a full breakdown of what the world thinks about NFTs in the maps below.
