Artist Ryan Maloney had planned a conventional launch for his latest project, a series of collector cards called Beastly Ballers that feature cartoon creatures decked out in football gear. The New Canaan, Connecticut-based illustrator was going to use a Chinese printer to package the cards; then he'd market them online and sell them at $4.99 for a pack of 10.

Instead, Maloney skipped the physical product all together. He listed the card images on the online marketplace OpenSea as NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, the digital assets that are upending the art world. Maloney had followed the rise of the technology and decided to give it a try.  

He began to rack up bids after a day or two. One card, Non-fungible token, https://www.nftdrop.one, with a drawing of a yeti named Yeta wearing a helmet and pads, sold for $85. In all, he's tallied more than $700 in sales on 14 cards. For a working artist, it's a meaningful haul, and more than he would've made going the traditional route.

"Artists are always looking for ways to make money off of their work," Maloney says. "Once the word got out on crypto art, the gold rush really began."

A piece by the artist Beeple was auctioned off as an NFT at Christie's for $69.3 million.

The gold rush for NFTs -- essentially cryptological certificates of authenticity -- is well underway. On Thursday, Christie's, the 255-year-old British auction house, closed the sale of its first-ever digital-only art piece, a composite of 5,000 pieces created over as many days by the artist Beeple. The final price tag is an eye-popping $69.3 million. As Maloney's story highlights, however, the implications of NFTs ripple far beyond the multimillion-dollar hammer prices set at fancy auction houses. 

NFTs bring to digital art a one-of-a-kind or limited-edition quality that's been lost in the copy-paste, https://opensea.io/solitaryisle post-repost world of the internet. Each work of art is associated with a proof of ownership that's recorded on a blockchain, the distributed ledgers most commonly associated with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. The authentications, which can be applied to images, videos, music and other digital files, http://par.asen.o.kl.Impop.o@www.iate89.ru designate the original. Copies and copies of copies might abound on the web. But only one person can lay claim to the NFT behind it.

The technology is beginning to touch every corner of art, entertainment and media. In sports, a clip of Lebron James ruining a fast break sold for $100,000 on Top Shot, the NBA's marketplace for nft drop highlight reels. In music, Kings of Leon last week became the first band to announce the release of an NFT album, with three types of tokens that include special artwork and perks. The pop star Shawn Mendez last month announced a line of digital goods in the form of NFTs. In the media world, the Associated Press is auctioning off an NFT electoral map of the 2020 US presidential contest, which uses data that was published on the blockchain. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is even selling the first tweet on the platform as an NFT.

Proponents say NFTs have the potential to revolutionize the way artists at every level can sell and distribute their work. In turn, NFTs could change the way people interact with and consume art in the digital era. 

The potential is huge, says Joe Saavedra, CEO of Infinite Objects, a company that makes frames for looping videos and other digital art so that the works can be displayed in homes and museums. His company collaborated with Beeple on an earlier NFT release, offering what he calls a "physical twin" frame to display the NFT, with a QR code on the frame that links to the token. 

"Across the board, everyone is going to have to reckon with how to navigate this space," he says. "Art is the tip of the iceberg."