Hi, I'm Naomi Shaven. Welcome to Axios Freecap, where we dig into one big story.

Today is Thursday, December 16th, and we're focused on NFTs, the latest craze in crypto.

For the last few podcast episodes of this year, I'm hosting conversations with my Axios colleagues about the biggest stories they covered this year and what they're watching heading into 2022.

Joining me today is Felix Salmon, senior financial correspondent, author of the Axios Capital newsletter, and frequent

fill-in host of this show. There were a bunch of trends on Wall Street, in finance, and in

cryptocurrencies that we could have picked to talk about in this conversation. And Felix, as you know,

is insightful and wickedly entertaining on all of these topics,

which didn't make it any easier.

But there's one technology, a blockchain innovation, that made its mark this year that we

couldn't ignore.

Non-fungible tokens.

In March, the artist known as people sold an NFT at a Christie's auction for an astonishing $69 million. After that,

you couldn't get away with not knowing what an NFT was. In a moment, I'll be joined by Felix

to discuss why NFTs are here to stay and what that tells us about how we think about online

community, collectibles, assets, and what that tells us about how we think about online community, collectibles,

assets, and art.

I'm joined now by my colleague Felix Salmon, who's our chief financial correspondent and the author

of the Axios Capital Newsletter. Hi, Felix. Hi, Naomi. So let's start here. How would you define NFTs?

They are little tokens which tell the world that you own a certain digital file.

Anyone can look at it, anyone can examine it, but only one person can own it, and that's the person who owns the NFT.

Let's imagine you're writing a piece about blockchain and cryptocurrencies and NFTs in 2021.

What would your headline be? Is this the year that NFTs went mainstream?

...