The intrigue - and costs - of the rise of non-fungible tokens or NFTs

THE latest investment fad to spark a flurry of interest - not to mention a flood of headlines and explainer articles - is the rise of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Yet while the focus has largely been on the nature of NFTs and how meaningful they actually are (or potentially could be) as investments, there are arguably larger issues worth considering too: the costs associated with their popularity.

An NFT is a blockchain-based record of information that is associated with a particular digital item - an image, say, or a video. While the underlying digital artefact can be easily reproduced, the idea is that an NFT identifies a single unique instance of the artefact, acting somewhat like a digital certificate of authenticity.