WHY THIS MATTERS IN BRIEF

NFT’s are normally used to sell digital assets, but this realtor’s now trying to use the technology to sell real objects … and it’s an interesting concept.

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We’re used to weird digital stuff being sold as NFT’s, or Non-Fungible Tokens, such as Jack Dorsey’s first tweet which sold for $2.6million or the original Nyan cat gif which sold for $560,000. Now though a real estate broker named Shane Dulgeroff has decided to take advantage of the NFT hype. He’s selling a house at 221 Dryden Street, in Thousand Oaks, California along with an NFT of a psychedelic video of the house.

The artwork and house are up for auction on OpenSea, with a minimum bid of 48 ETH, or almost $117,000. No one has bid yet, and the auction closes in seven days. The house previously sold at $746,000, according to real-estate platform Zillow.

Trippy, and this could be yours along with the real house …

“It’s less about the significance of the art as it is the significance of us using a platform like [OpenSea] to sell a home,” Dulgeroff told Fast Company. “The significance that the art will carry, it’s going to be stored in your digital wallet forever as living proof that you purchased the first home ever that was done through any kind of a crypto platform directly. So that’s where the real value is.”

NFTs are usually used to support digital goods — for instance: art, music, and trading cards. Currently there are no laws to explain how this might work, or what the taxes will be.

“It really is an interesting process navigating the legal side of it, the tax side of it, the transfer side of it to make sure it’s all done correctly,” Dulgeroff told Fast Company. Perhaps that explains the lack of bids — no one wants to get in trouble with tax collectors.

The art that comes with the house was designed by Kii Arens and his isn’t his NFT art, his pop-art confections inspired by Yusaku Maezawa’s attempted space mission are also up for sale. Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire, announced in 2018 that he planned to go to the Moon on board Elon Musks’ SpaceX moon mission “with artists.”

“I want to be on that spaceship as it travels farther than any human has from Earth,” Arens wrote to explain the inspiration for the NFT set.