NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music, your brain downloaded and turned into an AI), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art.Dogecoin isn’t an NFT. But this GIF of a dogecoin is.

So, what's being sold as an NFT?

You can copy a digital file as many times as you want, including the art that’s included with an NFT.But NFTs are designed to give you something that can’t be copied: ownership of the work (though the artist can still retain the copyright and reproduction rights, just like with physical artwork). To put it in terms of physical art collecting: anyone can buy a Monet print. But only one person can own the original.

What about piracy?

At a very high level, most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum is a cryptocurrency, like bitcoin or dogecoin, but its blockchain also supports these NFTs, which store extra information that makes them work differently from, say, an ETH coin.

How do they work?

Non-fungible token.That doesn’t make it any clearer. “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can’t be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A NFT is like:You gave up a Squirtle, and got a 1909 T206 Honus Wagner, which StadiumTalk <a href="https://www.stadiumtalk.com/s/most-expensive-baseball-cards-985687df1bbe45c5">calls “the Mona Lisa of baseball cards. </a>

What the heck is an NFT?

No, but technically anything digital could be sold as an NFT. deadmau5 has sold digital animated stickers. William Shatner has sold <a href="https://cointelegraph.com/news/william-shatners-nft-collectibles-sell-out-at-warp-speed">Shatner-themed trading cards </a>(one of which was apparently an X-ray of his teeth).