NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are the most exciting way to enjoy artwork in the digital age. As people discovered this new option for collecting and owning art, NFTs skyrocketed in popularity. Remarkable auctions made the news, and now everyone has heard about NFTs.

Enterprising collectors and connoisseurs were the first to see the incredible value that NFTs provided, but this medium is still in its infancy. In 2014, when NFTs were first being minted, no one knew what they were—and no one could have hoped to explain them. Are you curious to find out what all the fuss is about? Don’t worry—we’ll make understanding NFT art easy.

Simply put, NFT crypto art is a way to collect digital artwork in the traditional way. In other words, just as you can buy and own a famous painting, you can buy and own a famous NFT. This is a tough concept for many people to wrap their minds around, as we’ve been taught that everything on the internet is infinitely reproducible. Well, that’s just what non-fungible means—these tokens are not infinitely reproducible.

Think about it like this: imagine one person owns the Mona Lisa. Then, another person visits the painting and snaps a picture. When that picture is printed and copied, all the copies of the picture are fungible tokens. They’re not unique, and they’re all the same. Meanwhile, the Mona Lisa is a non-fungible token—the only one of its kind.

So how does something on the internet become completely unique, and isn’t a screenshot of an NFT the same thing as owning an NFT? You’ve probably heard of blockchain, which is a complicated system that acts as a digital ledger. NFT artists can add their work to the blockchain, which gives the art unique information and assigns ownership to it. Until the artist sells their work, the artist owns the piece, similar to how it works in real life with an artist and their original painting.

When the artist sells their work, the NFT’s ownership is transferred through the blockchain to the buyer. So, no—a screenshot is not the same thing as owning an NFT. An NFT comes with digital data in its very essence that states who the true owner is.