A performance art statement recently made by a digital graphic artist underscores the risks involved within the emerging world of non-fungible tokens, which have become the latest craze in the digital currency markets despite not really being currencies.

The artist in question, who goes by "Neitherconfirm," minted 26 non-fungible tokens representing rather nice graphic pieces that could be described as portraits with a stained glass visual effect. The NFTs were placed on the OpenSea market, but he remained in control of them, and he decided to change them into images of carpets. What the artist illustrated, so to speak, is a problem faced by NFT investors: What happens when NFT creators "pull the rug" from under the feet of unsuspecting token holders?"

NFTs are intended to be digital assets that hold underlying objects of value, mostly of the digital multimedia kind. They are ostensibly ideal for computer graphics, sound files, and other digital works that can be deemed as being valuable as long as they are original. The way the artist explained it, his performance art piece, which has been compared to the antics pulled by the enigmatic British graffiti artist Banksy, underscores the problem with the NFT business model, particularly when it depends on a centralized blockchain platform.

As can be imagined, the aforementioned NFTs actually increased in value after they were subject to the performance art; this means that images of carpets are worth more to speculators than the original portraits that resembled stained glass. Something else the artist pointed out is that changing the images could have been done by someone else, thus indicating a security flaw with the NFTs themselves.

Some artists who create in this burgeoning NFT field have been able to nicely cash in from their work. The current record was set by an artist known as Beeple, whose NFT was sold for $6.6 million. Even Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey has joined the NFT bandwagon with an auction of a tweet he composed, and which could fetch $2.5 million. Cryptocurrency analysts believe that NFTs are currently in a tulip mania phase that could bubble up and burst later this year.