Crypto investors mean that as a compliment of the highest order. Their growing obsession with cubes of tungsten, a material admired for its tightly packed particle structure, hit a new high this week.

What happened: A group of investors called the TungstenDAO purchased an NFT of a 2-ton (but just over 14 dainty inches) tungsten cube for 56.9 ether, or about $250,000. The NFT comes with the right to visit the cube once a year in its private storage room at the Illinois headquarters of its manufacturer, Midwest Tungsten Service.

From metal → meme

Midwest Tungsten Service makes tungsten for industrial uses, but started selling small cubes of the metal in 2015 as desktop knickknacks. That soon evolved into a meme when ridiculous Amazon reviews piled up exalting the “intensity of its density.”

Then, this year, influential crypto investors like Coin Center’s Director of Communications Neeraj K. Agrawal went full magpie on the metal. A few tweets later and Midwest Tungsten Service’s Amazon store sold out…read more.