Token Supremacy

The Art of Finance, the Finance of Art, and the Great Crypto Crash of 2022

By: Zachary Small

Narrated by: Gabby Beans

A New York Times investigative reporter wades into the murky, pixelated waters of the multibillion-dollar NFT market—the virtual casino that sprang up overnight in 2020 and came crashing down, with all its celebrity hucksters, just two years later. A vibrant and witty exploration of the increasingly blurry line between art and money, artist and con artist, value and worthlessness.

“A perfect book to understand and to laugh at the craziness of the art world today."—Jerry Saltz, author of How to Be an Artist

In 2021, when the gavel fell at Christie’s on the sale of Mike Winkelmann’s Everydays series—a compilation of five thousand digital artworks—it made a thunderous announcement: Non-fungible tokens had arrived. The ludicrous world of CryptoKitties and Bored Apes had just produced a piece of art worth $69.3 million (at least according to the highest bidder). On that day, the traditional art market—the largest unregulated market in the world—put its stamp of approval on a very new and carnivalesque digital reality. But what did it mean for these two worlds to collide? Was it all just a money laundering scheme? And come on, what was that piece of digital flotsam really worth anyway?

In Token Supremacy, Zachary Small works through these and other fascinating questions, tracing the crypto economy back to its origins in the 2008 financial crisis and the lineage of NFTs back to the first photographic negatives. Small describes jaw-dropping tales of heists, publicity stunts, and rug pulls, before zeroing in on the role of "security tokens" in the FTX scandal. Detours through art history provide insight into the mythmaking tactics that drive stratospheric auction sales and help the wealthy launder their finances (and reputations) through art. And we cast an eye toward the future of NFTs—in mortgages, restaurants, securities, and loans—that could outlive cryptocurrencies, becoming a new and dangerous shadow banking system in its own right.

A wild and spellbinding tour through a world that strains belief.

©2024 Zachary Small (P)2024 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"A delirious chronicle of a deranged era."—Felix Salmon, Chief Financial Correspondent, Axios, and author of The Phoenix Economy

"A riveting dispatch from a digital dream world, Token Supremacy unravels the complexities and contradictions of a bubble in which venerable auction houses sold digital monkey cartoons for millions of dollars. Zachary Small doesn’t just laugh at the absurdity of NFTs—they bring the reader up close to the artists and hustlers who rode the wave to ridiculous fortunes and art-world fame."—Zeke Faux, author of Number Go Up

"Zachary Small is the perfect, sardonic guide to the meteoric rise of NFTs and the dumpster fire sparked by their fall. Their gripping narrative pulls apart the NFT's unholy mixture of idealism and greed, squiggles and dick jokes, techno-utopianism and bug-ridden tech to reveal the kaleidoscope of ever-changing grifts produced by the latest collision of art and finance."—Erin Thompson, author of Smashing Statues and art crime professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Authoritative journalism for intro-level understanding

The audio production is extremely choppy and poorly edited. This feels very rushed and not produced to the level of expectation given the stature of the author and the relevancy to the current global financial situation. The author covered many of the largest stories, and had some breaks, for the NYTimes, so the content is very high level. It still lacks a great deal of nuance and additional layers of stories that surrounded these events. Hoping for another book in the future.

Meh

What’s the point ? NFTs are dumb?
If you are very interested in NFTs, but completely missed everything maybe you would like this