That note on NFTs that got turned into an NFT, written by lawyers interested in NFTs

What on earth is an NFT?!

We suspect that if you’re reading this, then you’ve probably at least heard of Bitcoin or Ether before.

What about tokens? Somewhere across the internet (or life, but probably the internet) people may have used the term ‘token’ to describe cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether. It’s understandable — but it’s not strictly true as there are some differences between tokens and cryptocurrencies like BTC and ETH.

Popular cryptos such as BTC and ETH run on their own blockchain. Conversely, tokens are native currencies which are created/distributed as part of projects which piggyback off another blockchain. Those projects effectively use that particular blockchain as a host instead of running off its own mainnet. Oh, and it’s important to remember that tokens issued on the blockchain are digital representations of a wide range of assets — you can’t physically touch these assets because they live in the digital world. In fact, cryptos like BTC and ETH are exactly the same. But you already knew that.

The Ethereum blockchain is a real hotspot for these types of projects: Dapps (or if you’re really mad at it you can call it by its full name, distributed apps).

You may have heard this one really cool feature of blockchain tech — that it provides real transparency over the process of recording transactions. We say real transparency, because once you upload information on the blockchain, it’s there until the end of time for everyone to see and gives some serious meaning to #nofilter. But there’s another cool thing that the Ethereum blockchain is known for: smart contracts. Without smart contracts, there are no Dapps, and honestly, what’s a world without Dapps?

Here’s another piece to the Ethereum/Dapps puzzle — there are a bunch of different computers around the world called validators which are given the job of validating all transactions that go through the blockchain. This job is very energy intensive so anyone who participates in keeping the (blockchain) community thriving is given an incentive to do so.

Enter tokens…

When a validator — let’s call it Bob — validates a transaction, Bob gets given a reward for carrying out that task. This reward is in the form of the native cryptographic token of a particular project. If, for…