The first official Star Trek NFT is here. Roddenberry Entertainment is turning Gene Roddenberry's signature on the show's first contract into a digital art piece, referring to it as the first "Living Eco-NFT." The NFT, which was signed in 1965, is unique in that the creators implemented the Star Trek creator's signature into a living bacteria cell. This means that as the cell makes new copies of itself, the NFT grows by a factor of around a billion a night.

How does the unique Star Trek NFTs work?

DNA is how mother nature stores data. However, it doesn't encode the data by zeroes and ones. Instead, it uses nucleotides adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, otherwise known as A, T, G, and C, for short. How these nucleotides combine to make up the genetic instructions of a particular DNA. You can also use this code to store digital information like an NFT.

At the moment, the first Star Trek NFT, "El Primero", is still dormant. Scientists reportedly freeze-dried the cells after 10 hours so that anyone can reanimate them in the future, in order that the bacteria can start replicating on their own. Anyone interested can view the bacteria inside a vial encased inside a glass cube at the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair.

What's particularly interesting about how El Primero works is that it's not like traditional NFTs. It is effectively a synthetic version of DNA, so it can save energy with minimal greenhouse gas emissions. Not to mention, you can't buy the Star Trek NFT on any traditional blockchain. Instead, Roddenberry Entertainment worked with Solana.

The "Proof of Stake" mechanism of Solana requires users to lock existing tokens to prove their "stake" so to maintain the accuracy of the ledger. By getting rid of the same puzzles used by other Blockchain, Proof of Stake minimizes most of the negativity surrounding the use of NFTs. For a more vivid comparison, Solana claims that a single transaction is equal to two Google Searches. On the other hand, a single transaction on Ethereum consumes as much electricity as the average household does in nearly 7 days.

Technically, this newly-minted Star Trek NFT isn't the first Star Trek NFT. Back in July 2020, Star Trek fans bought NFT trading cars that featured William Shatner's Captain Kirk a month before Shatner spoke about how NFTs are a "revolution of knowledge."

In other news, Discord recently backtracked on its NFT plans following user backlash. Meanwhile, there are speculations about a big NFT-based AAA shooter in the works from former Halo developers. The Matrix Resurrections and Quentin Tarantino are also getting NFTs as well.