The Weirdest NFTs That People Have Bought
Bubble Digits
Just understanding the “non-fungible token” is difficult, even for the tech savvy, but that doesn’t keep NFTs from selling for millions of dollars. Their purpose, after all, is to manufacture exclusivity, because owning a one-of-a-kind thing — say, the “Mona Lisa” — is light years from snapping a photo of the painting at a museum. When you buy an NFT, you're actually buying a line of unalterable software code (the “token”) that records sales; you use digital currency such as Bitcoin to make the purchase on the “blockchain,” a record book everyone can see. That lets you prove you’re the sole owner of some kind of asset, whether it's a Tweet, a plot of “land” in a video game, an undrinkable beer, a two-minute video of a cat purring or, most commonly, digital artwork. That means that people have been buying and selling all kinds of weird stuff, including photoshopped images of a former president, and sometimes for vast sums of money — a possible new kind of tech bubble.
Related: Things You Wanted to Know About Cryptocurrencies but Were Afraid to Ask
Donald Trump Digital Trading Cards
Price: $99 each
People snapped up Donald Trump's NFT trading cards when they went on sale, hoping to make a profit by reselling. But after just one week, the resale price of those NFTs crashed, as the former president might say, "bigly." When the 45,000 cards went on sale December 15, 2022 they retailed for $99 each — and sold out within hours. By December 17, the resale price peaked at 0.82 Ethereum, or $999, according to the NFT marketplace OpenSea. Since then, however, resale value of each card is now 0.23 Ethereum, or $280, according to the website. While they're still worth more than that initial purchase price, those hoping to see peak resale amounts might want to unload the cards — which featured images of Trump dressed as a superhero, astronaut, sheriff and NASCAR driver, among other icons — while they still can. It has been claimed that many of the images were used without authorization and could result in lawsuits.
Related: U.S. Presidents' Net Worth, Before and After Taking Office
Taco Bell Taco-Themed Collection
Price: $69 million
Would you pay for a burrito you couldn't bite into or cover in diablo sauce? Someone did. For $69 million, they now own the first Taco Bell NFT collection and its taco-adorned gifs. That's a ridiculous sum of money, but at least all the profits went to the Taco Bell Foundation, a charity for youth scholarships.
Related: Spicy Secrets Behind Taco Bell's Success
A Symphony of Recorded Farts
Price: $85
Of course someone, somehow, was going to get farts into NFTs. That person was Alex Ramirez-Mallis, who recorded his and his friends' farts over a year's time and minted them into NFTs. There are individual farts for sale and "one calendar year of recorded farts." A 52-minute symphony of the year's noises sold for a whole $85 — small price to pay to not have to smell them.
Digital Toilet Paper
Price: $4,100
It seems like most people buying NFTs are in it to be cool, so it's a little surprising that someone actually bought digital toilet paper. Charmin minted NFTs featuring images or gifs of rolls of TP festooned with flowers or poop emojis and "enjoy the go." If you buy one, it comes with a physical display to hang by your toilet. All proceeds go to charity.
Related: Things You Never Knew About Toilet Paper
Virtual House
Price: $512,000
Designed by Canadian artist Krista Kim, a virtual home called Mars House sold for over half a million dollars. She designed the house to be meditative and calming, working with a designer to create a virtual space with a program usually used to create video games. The only way you can experience the home is through virtual reality; the buyer will be sent a 3D digital file.
Impossible Furniture
Price: $450,000
Need some digital furniture to go in that virtual house? Argentinian designer Andrés Reisinger can help. The furniture artist has sold what he calls the impossible furniture collection — surreal pieces of furniture that don't look all that comfortable, honestly — to place in any shared 3D virtual space, even games such as Minecraft.
Winged War Babies
Price: $5.8 million
Canadian artist and musician Grimes, who's better known as Elon Musk's on-again-off-again girlfriend, created 10 digital works of art: winged naked babies with tattoos and spears guarding the planet Mars. Are those babies in this dark and exceedingly weird scene protecting the planet from the colonization attempts of her ex? Who knows, but they sold for $5.8 million total.
Related: Surprising Things Tesla Makes That Aren't Electric Cars
Non-Fungible Twig for Dogs
Price: $1,200
Will Fido appreciate a stick he can't fetch? If you think so, grab this $1,200 stick NFT, also known as a non-fungible twig. The lucky bidder gets a "one-of-a-kind, original artwork curated by a dog for dogs" — an image of the stick sent via email — but uniquely, also the actual stick! It was plucked from a West Village sidewalk with a "putrid smell of overflowing trash that makes the area so irresistible to dogs."
Side Eyeing Chloe
Price: $73,953
Whether you recognize the name "Side Eyeing Chloe" or not, you've definitely seen the meme at some point. The toddler looking at the camera trepidatiously has become a catch-all response to any outrageous or cringe-worthy content. Her mom, Katie Clem, decided to cash in and mint the meme. It sold for $73,953 to a music label, and the money is going toward Chloe's college fund.
World Wide Web Source Code
Price: $5.4 million
The World Wide Web was invented by a British computer scientist named Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 1989. He decided to auction off the original time-stamped source code as an NFT named — appropriately — “This Changed Everything.” It was auctioned by Sotheby's to an unknown buyer.
Related: The Biggest Buzzwords the Year You Were Born
The First Tweet
Price: $2.9 million
In another internet first, Jack Dorsey, the founder of social media network Twitter, decided to auction off his first tweet, which makes it the first tweet ever. The tweet read, "just setting up my twttr" in a perfunctory, this-is-a-test way. It was bought by the CEO of a Malaysian blockchain company.
Related: High-Profile CEOs Who Left Their Companies
Colors
Price: $8,000
It doesn't seem like anyone could own a color, but technically now you can, whether that means anything or not. One company is creating NFTs of specific colors — 1,690 of them — and putting them into categories of “standard,” “epic,” and “legendary.” The most expensive one, Coffee, sold for 2,000 tez, or around $8,000. If you'd like a measly standard color, those can be had for around $80.
A Burnt Banksy
Price: $380,000
A group of artists called Burnt Banksy banded together to buy an original Banksy print, “Morons,” for $95,000. Instead of admiring it on a wall, they decided to set it on fire during a live Youtube stream, destroying the expensive artwork. They then minted an NFT of the event and sold it — for a pretty good return on investment, honestly.
Related: You Won't Believe How Much These Collectibles Fetched at Auction
A Patch of Arm Skin
Price: $5,000
If selling parts of your body on the internet is part of the dystopian future, the future is now. Croatian tennis player Oleksandra Oliynykova sold a 15-by-18-centimeter patch of skin on her right arm for sponsorship money. It's advertising space, and the buyer can dictate what tattoo goes in the spot.
A Tweet of Terrible Fyre Festival Food
Price: $80,000
The Fyre Festival, a fraudulent music festival in the Bahamas in 2017, quickly entered the zeitgeist as an outrageous bait-and-switch; documentaries were made for Hulu and Netflix. One attendee, Trevor DeHaas, tweeted an infamous photo of a terrible sandwich he was served, and last year turned that tweet into an NFT. It sold for $80,000 and he used the money to pay for his kidney transplant. At least something good came out of that festival.
Related: The Worst Scams of the Past Decade
Digital Game Property
Price: $1.5 million
Buying things in games isn't new, but making those things into NFTs is. In 2021, a user of the game Axie Infinity bought a piece of digital land in the game for $1.5 million, the largest digital land sale recorded at the time. What are they going to do with that very expensive property? Breed cute digital monsters on it, apparently.
Disaster Girl
Price: $473,000
Another little girl capitalizing on her young internet fame as a meme is Zoe Roth, otherwise known as Disaster Girl. She's seen smiling mischievously in front of a house fire in the infamous photo, making it look like she may have started it. (It's a controlled burn, thankfully.) Now in her early 20s, Roth decided to mint the original digital photo; it sold for almost a half a million dollars.
An Article About NFTs
Price: $1,814
In perhaps the most meta NFT of all, an NFT explainer article by Samanth Subramanian and David Yanofsky on the website Quartz was minted and sold as an NFT itself. The money it made was donated to the International Women's Media Foundation.
Numbers
Price: $4,500
Just like colors, you can now own numbers, apparently. The N Project sells numbers as NFTs, made with eight digits using a random-number generator. You can buy and sell them for a few hundred dollars, though some have fetched higher prices. The weirdest part is that anyone's buying them at all.
A Collective Digital Artwork
Price: $91.8 million
No, that figure is not a typo. An anonymous artist named Pak created a simple digital picture of spheres on a black background. It was sold in pieces that were called masses, which were initially sold for $525 each. Over two days in December, 28,983 buyers picked up 312,686 pieces for a total end value of $92 million for a single artwork. It's the most expensive NFT ever sold.
Beeple Digital Artwork
Price: $69.3 million
If an artwork being owned by thousands of people seems like cheating to you, then this is actually the most expensive NFT ever sold. An artist named Beeple created a digital artwork called “The First 5000 Days” that was a composite of 5,000 images he made once per day from 2007 to 2020. The auction started at a measly $100, but cryptocurrency and NFT enthusiasts sent it skyrocketing.
More from Cheapism
Like Cheapism's content? Be sure to follow us.
