A selection of Beatles memorabilia, including outfits worn by John Lennon and Paul McCartney, will be sold at auction - but successful bidders will not get to keep the physical items.
Julian Lennon - John’s eldest son - has announced the beginning of bidding for items that will be sold as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as ‘Lennon Connection: The NFT Collection.’
This means Julian will keep the items physically, while the purchasers will receive the memorabilia in the form of an ‘audio-visual collectable’ - essentially a digital image of the item along with narration.
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‘Items’ for sale include several of Lennon ’s guitars, his Magical Mystery Afghan Coat, the black cape he wore in the film Help! and McCartney ’s lyric notes for Hey Jude.
About the auction, Julian told Rolling Stone magazine: “Through this NFT collection, I’m able to grant exclusive access to special items that I cherish and carry on the legacy of my father in a new way.”
The items are being sold in partnership with Julian's auction house and Yellow Heart NFT. Part of the proceeds will go to Julian Lennon’s White Feather Foundation.
A statement on the site says: “Own a piece of music history as Julian Lennon unveils his inaugural digital exhibition, with his private collection of John Lennon and Beatles memorabilia, including Paul McCartney’s rare, handwritten notes from ‘Hey Jude.’”
The online auction will be held on February 7, though bidding and registration has begun.
What are NFTs?
NFTs are one of the latest developments in the world of cryptocurrency - forms of currency which use digital files as money.
They use cryptography (code) in order to secure transactions.
Transactions are then verified and records are maintained by a decentralised system, rather than a centralised one.
In essence, this means that cryptocurrencies are not bound by a centralised authority in charge of issuing or regulation, such as the Bank of England.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) tend to be assets bought with cryptocurrency, reports The Mirror .
In economics, a fungible asset is something with units that can be readily interchanged, like money.
For example, you can swap a £20 note for two £10 notes and have the same value.
If something is non-fungible, it means that it has unique properties and can’t be interchanged with something else.
In relatively simple terms, NFTs are “one-of-a-kind” assets in the digital world that can be sold like anything else.
NFTs can take the form of digital artwork, GIFs, tweets, virtual trading cards, music, virtual real estate and more.
They turn digital works of art and other collectables into verifiable assets that can easily be traded on the 'blockchain' - the system in which a record of transactions made in cryptocurrency are maintained.
These digital tokens can be thought of as certificates of ownership for virtual or physical assets. No physical object changes hands, because NFTs exist exclusively in digital form.
As with crypto-currency, a blockchain (digital record) acts as a public ledger to verify ownership status.
This does not stop the image being easily copied by anyone online, but an NFT provides someone the 'honour' of knowing that they 'own' the original image.
This does not stop people from right-clicking and saving a copy of an image that is an NFT, or screenshotting it.
However, many NFT owners believe that 'right-clickers' don't understand the value of 'owning' the original, even if it is a digital image.
Many critics then argue that copying and sharing these digital works can be easy, but others state that copying has long existed in the physical art world.
The buyer of an NFT owns a “token” which proves that only they have the “original” work.
As mentioned earlier, someone else could screenshot the NFT, but that would not make them a rightful owner.
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