In whisky, as in life, there are timely and timeless trends. The latest trend fighting for timelessness is the non-fungible token, or NFT. These tokens are a part of Web 3.0, the new wave of the internet focused on decentralisation. Where Web 1.0 was about the consumption of content and Web 2.0 was the creation of content (hello, social media), the latest iteration is eschewing the big tech platforms, abandoning some of the traditional regulations, and building instead a new-look internet that its supporters claim is meant to benefit the many, not the few.
An NFT is a digital token that exists on the blockchain – a sort of public ledger – meaning there can only be one official instance of it. Made famous as art, they now also take the form of membership tokens to clubs or even a share in a fund that invests on behalf ofbe “burned”, a process that destroys or marks the NFT, often to indicate it has been redeemed for something.
