>"With the financial innovation rapidly impacting visual culture, Peter Brock explores what this shift could mean for power relations within the art world" The business of contemporary art has largely concerned itself with the sale of unique, physical objects whose provenance is verified by galleries, scholars, auction houses and, typically, a trail of paper. Digital art is at least several decades old but, until recently, has not been collected in the same way as painting or sculpture – partly because it was impossible to distinguish an original from a copy. Now, with the advent of the Non-fungible Token (NFT), art-world institutions are scrambling to adapt to a new type of transaction that is generating jaw-dropping auction prices. The artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, set a record last month when his collage of images, Everydays: The First 5,000 Days (2021), sold for US$69 million, but the volume of NFT commerce is also impressive. According to NonFungible, there were nearly 80,000 weekly transactions in March. The quantitative nature of all this hype, however, reveals something important about the phenomenon: at this stage, NFTs are primarily a financial innovation whose impact on visual culture remains unclear.