Jack 1st tweet as NFT selling for $2.5m

twitter.com

5 points·bretpiatt··5 comments

Could someone explains in layman's terms what's going on here?

It's a stupid fad where you can "own" a digital asset (jack's first tweet in this case) using blockchain tech. People are comparing it to owning a physical asset, like an original painting by Leonardo da Vinci, but that's nonsense.

Do you understand how this works technically? Like, what bits are in the token and how do they describe ownership of a tweet?

Here is sample metadata from one of the tweets sold: https://explorer-mainnet.maticvigil.com/tokens/0x28009881f0F...

This data is stored on the Matic blockchain. The most important bits are

1) Text contents of the tweet

2) Canonical link to tweet (on twitter)

3) Digital signature by owner (using their ethereum wallet)

Valuables (the service minting tweets) is also responsible for linking a twitter account to an ethereum address. Also, these tweets are purely collectibles, i.e. they don't confer copyright or commercial rights to the buyer.

Perfect, thanks, that's what I was looking for (and none of the news coverage seems to mention).

So when you want to sell a tweet, Valuables verifies who you are and that you own the account (presumably), they produce one certificate and promise never to produce another, and then it goes into the blockchain.

So now there is one and only one entry for this tweet in the Valuables Twitter namespace, but there can be more from other organizations and on other blockchains.

It's going to become even more of a collectors' item when Valuables shuts down, or Twitter changes their URL scheme, or we're not using https:// anymore ;)

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