Cash and cash equivalents are guaranteed to lose value. Subsequently, everyone gets pushed

farther and farther out onto the risk curve. Everyone is looking to move their money into

assets to avoid the loss of value inherent in those negative real rates. And it means that things

that used to be perceived as risky are actually taking the role of less risky assets or even

safe havens. In other words,

bonds become useless, stocks become bonds, venture capital become stocks, art and NFTs become venture

capital. Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin,

and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

The breakdown is sponsored by nex0.io and Casper and produced and distributed by CoinDesk.

What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, March 11th, and that sound you hear is the sound of people's heads absolutely exploding.

A few times in previous episodes I've mentioned the Beeple auction going on at Christie's.

This is the first time the famous auction house has auctioned off a completely digital good.

They had previously included NFT versions of some physical items that were up for

auction, but this was the first time it was just an NFT. Well, the final bids are in and the price

paid for people's the first 5,000 days was $69,346,250.

First of all, the folks over on Wall Street bets are in utter disbelief that the price wasn't $69,420,069.

Second of all, crypto Twitter is absolutely friggin losing their minds.

This is a crescendo, perhaps the first of many, but definitely the first of the

NFT mania sweeping the world. I've given the background before, but in short, NFTs are non-fungible

tokens. Non-fungible means that rather than every token being like every other token,

in other words, each Bitcoin is like each other Bitcoin, they're mutually interchangeable. Each tether is equivalent to each other tether. These are cryptographically

unique tokens. That uniqueness lends them well to the actual owning, quote-unquote, of the

...