"In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie's on the sale of Mike Winkelmann's Everydays series --a compilation of five thousand digital artworks-- it made a thunderous announcement: non-fungible tokens had arrived. On that day, the traditional art market --the largest unregulated market in the world-- put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide? Was it all just a money laundering scheme? In Token Supremacy, Zachary Small works through these and other fascinating questions, tracing the crypto economy back to its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the lineage of NFTs back to the first photographic negatives. Small describes jaw-dropping tales of heists, publicity stunts, and rug pulls, before zeroing in on the role of "security tokens" in the FTX scandal. Detours through art history provide insight into the mythmaking tactics that drive stratospheric auction sales and help the wealthy launder their finances (and reputations) through art. And we cast an eye toward a future when NFTs --in mortgages, restaurants, securities, and loans-- could outlive cryptocurrencies, becoming a new and dangerous shadow-banking system in its own right. A wild and spellbinding tour through a world that strains belief"-- Provided by publisher.
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