Digital NFT Art Is Booming—But at What Cost?

In central Washington State, electric utilities are watching for homes with oddly high power usage after a recent surge in cryptocurrency prices collided with a boom in NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens”—an emerging technology that uses crypto platforms to authenticate ownership of digital files. In an emerging hype cycle, such digital assets have sold at auction for millions of dollars, giving the buyer claim to an “original” version of a computer file, such as a piece of digital art or a sports highlight video.