Remember NFTs? Essentially JPEGs that cost a lot of money, non-fungible tokens were really big for a brief while among C-tier celebrities, budding criminals, and Ubisoft, until the internet was finally able to bully them out of sight and thus out of mind: Not really gone, but mostly forgotten. But a funny thing recently happened that dragged them back into my memory: Thousands of NFTs that people had paid millions of dollars for very suddenly disappeared—or at least the images associated with them did—not the result of a rug pull but because nobody was paying for the servers.
According to a 404 Media report, this all goes back to 2021 when Nike, the shoe company, acquired RTFKT—pronounced "artifact," although you can say it differently if you like—for an unknown but presumably astronomical amount of money. That partnership resulted in "CryptoKicks," more prosaically described as pictures of sneakers that rich people paid obscene amounts of money for, but RTFKT also partnered with other creators to churn out similarly pricey digital images.
