Jaiden Stipp couldn’t believe his eyes. It was February 2021, and the then 15-year-old from Tacoma, Washington, was selling his first piece of digital artwork as an NFT, or non-fungible token. Well past midnight, he remained fixated on his computer screen, watching in awe as the bids climbed higher and higher.
When Jaiden woke up in the morning, bids were still pouring in. The final selling price for his cartoonish graphic of an astronaut-skeleton waving at the moon was 20ETH*—an amount in cryptocurrency worth about $30,000 at the time.
“I was like freaking out and jumping around the house,” he says. “After I saw some of the huge sales going on, I was like whoa . . . these might have the potential to go pretty big.”
An NFT is a digital file that’s usually bought using cryptocurrency and is built on a blockchain (see “Terms to Know”), a