Elon Musk Takes Shot At NFTs Once Again: ‘It’s Just A URL To The JPEG’
Billionaire Elon Musk is a fan of several cryptocurrencies but also a notable critic of non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Musk shared more criticism of NFTs during an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan.
What Happened: Over the last few years, Musk has been a fan of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin BTC/USD and Dogecoin DOGE/USD.
The billionaire has criticized NFTs in the past, but also praised the work of noted NFT artist Beeple. The start of the podcast with Rogan and Musk kicked off with a short conversation on Beeple.
“He’s pretty edgy,” Musk said of Beeple.
Musk admitted he used to follow Beeple on “the X platform,” but had to stop as some of the images were “too jarring.”
The duo discussed how impressive it was that Beeple does a new digital image creation every single day.
Beeple responded on Twitter, now known as X, to thank Musk for the shoutout and to also apologize for “the night terrors.”
Later in their interview, Rogan and Musk discussed the large amounts of scams in the cryptocurrency sector and Rogan noted that most NFTs are scams, but said that Beeple was “legit.”
Musk shared his criticism of NFTs, but it came mostly from a place of technicality rather than a hatred of the idea.
“NFTs not even on the blockchain, it’s just a URL to the JPEG,” Musk said. “Should at least encode the JPEG in the blockchain.”
Musk added if the company housing the images goes out of business, “you don’t’ have the image anymore.”
Related Link: Twitter Getting More Web3 Friendly, But Will It Last With NFT Hater Elon Musk Now In Charge
Why It’s Important: Musk’s past criticism of NFTs includes calling out X for prioritizing NFT profile picture verification over focusing on spambots.
Musk previously said that “NFTs are jpeging the dollar” and shared several memes making fun of NFTs including
In May 2022, Musk trolled owners of NFTs by changing his Twitter profile picture to a collage of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs.
“I dunno … seems kinda fungible,” Musk tweeted at the time.
Speculation increased that Musk might own a Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT thanks to a picture of him with the co-founder of MoonPay, a company that onboarded multiple celebrities to the NFT space.
With the criticism of non-fungible tokens not being on the blockchain, several people have pointed out some NFT collections are on-chain and shared the rise of Bitcoin ordinals that happened in 2023.
OnChainMonkey was one of the NFT collections that was on-chain.
OnChainMonkey co-founder Danny Yang also shared his take on Musk’s comments.
“He’s spot on in saying NFTs are url pointers to JPEGs that are not on the blockchain. That’s most NFTs. That’s because the Ethereum ERC-721 standard for NFTs is the most widely adopted standard for NFTs,” Yang tweeted.
Yang said the new NFT standard on Bitcoin called Ordinals is around “actual on-chain NFTs.”
“Elon may like Ordinals. We are early!” OnChainMonkey tweeted.
NFT analyst Punk9059 shared data showing how Musk’s comments may have led to increased activity in on-chain NFTs.
“Bitcoin Punks, OnChainMonkey, Bitcoin Frogs all strong on the back of Bitcoin strength and Elon’s comments about onchain storage of NFTs,” the account tweeted.
NFT collection Art Blocks also highlighted that they are on-chain in a Twitter post telling Musk that they “beg to differ” about NFTs not being on-chain.
Twitter account @NFTBark said that the comment from Musk “misses the opportunity this tech presents.”
“We need to stop using the term ‘NFTs’ interchangeably with the PFP and digital art market. This software can do so much more than that. The concept of provable digital ownership has widespread general purpose applications across a variety of industries,” the account tweeted.
NFTBark shared examples of industries such as ticketing, apparel, healthcare and others that could use the blockchain for good.
Read Next: What Are Bitcoin Ordinals?
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