From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobaro. This is Adali.

Today, it started with a picture posted on the internet and ended in an extravagant

cryptocurrency bidding war. Now to the latest trend that's sweeping the internet,

the skyrocketing prices for digital art sold as NFTs.

NFT and that stands for non-fungible token.

My colleague, Sabrina Tavinesi, speaks with columnist Kevin Rus about digital currencies

newest frontier, his unexpected role in it and why it actually matters.

It's Tuesday, April 13th.

So Kevin, I realized how little I understood about your world when I saw this headline of

yours in the paper and I'm going to read it to you right now. So it says, why did someone pay

$560,000 for a picture of my column? So tell me about that.

Well, actually that is a little outdated because the exchange rates have fluctuated since I

published that column. So someone actually paid $725,000 for a picture of my column.

So you're saying you sold something that everybody can read online basically for free

for hundreds of thousands of real dollars. Yeah, I mean, I would like to think that all my columns

are worth at least $725,000. Okay, Kevin. But that might have been an anomaly. But that is the

world of NFTs for you. So Kevin, where does the story of NFTs begin?

So the story of NFTs really starts with the story of cryptocurrencies and in particular with Bitcoin,

which began all the way back in 2008. During the financial crisis, there was a mortgage meltdown,

the Federal Reserve was bailing out banks and printing all this money trying to stabilize the economy.

And in the middle of all this, this mysterious paper appeared on a cryptography email to serve.

And it was written by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. And it proposed this new form of

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