Digital Art Resource Guide

A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data on a digital ledger (a blockchain) where each unit can represent a unique digital item, and thus the units are not interchangeable. NFTs can represent digital files such as digital art, audio, video, and other forms of digital creative work. While the creative works themselves are infinitely copyable, the NFTs representing them are tracked on the blockchain and provide proof of ownership of the NFTs to the buyers.^[1][2] NFTs conform to different token standards on different blockchains such as Ethereum.

NFTs can be used to commodify digital creations, such as digital art, video game items, and music files. Access to any copy of the original file, however, is not restricted to the owner of the token. The speculative market for NFTs soared in early 2021 when the same investors who had speculated on cryptocurrencies traded NFTs at greatly increasing volumes. NFTs mostly run on a proof-of-work blockchain, which is less energy efficient than a proof-of-stake blockchain, which has resulted in some criticism of the carbon footprint for NFT transactions.

From Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token