Pixel this

When Magnus Carlsen won last year’s Meltwater Champions Tour, they made two trophies. One was for Carlsen, and the second was auctioned online, fetching a sum in digital currency of around $25,000. The trophy only exists as a video showing a stack of rotating gold squares, like a Donald Trump skyscraper from the future.

If you bought it, you’d be right on trend. Earlier in 2021, the winning bid at Christie’s for a digital artwork named ‘Everydays: the First 5000 Days’ came in at $69 million. That was for an elaborate collage created by graphic designer Mike Winkelmann, using the pseudonym ‘Beeple’.

The pixels aren’t worth diddly squat, since anyone can download a copy. But the artwork (like Carlsen’s trophy) was sold in the form of an ‘NFT’ (non-fungible token) registered on a public blockchain. Thanks to cryptography, these tokens can be bought and sold, like a digital certificate of ownership. Unlike the generic pixels, an NFT can be traced back to the person who owns it.

Predictably, multi-million dollar prices have only quickened the stampede into this nascent asset class, which includes plenty of more affordable gewgaws too. It might be just the madness of crowds, but people keep buying them.

Chess-themed NFTs continue to proliferate. In December, Garry Kasparov auctioned off a collection of memorabilia including old photos and scoresheets. Judit Polgar released a digital artwork commemorating her famous victory over Kasparov in 2002. More recently the German company ChessBase experimented with a series of NFTs titled ‘Moments of Genius’, featuring artworks which meld portraits of the world champions with their most famous games. Bidders were placed in a lottery to win a bonus Korchnoi NFT, featuring the game shown below (which was unfamiliar to me).