John Lennon's son Julian is selling The Beatles memorabilia as NFTs so he can ...

Julian Lennon will be selling The Beatles memorabilia as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), which are a form of cryptographic data, which will allow him to keep the originals. 

The eldest son of the late John Lennon, 58, plans to flog several pieces from his personal collection, but they will be sold as the one-of-a-kind digital assets.

Items up for auction on February 7 as part of the collection include a black cape worn by John in Help! as well as handwritten notes for the band's 1968 classic Hey Jude, which was inspired by Julian and written by Sir Paul McCartney.

The sale also features three Gibson guitars which the photographer was given by his dad, and an Afghan coat the Imagine hitmaker wore in the Magical Mystery Tour film.

Each item will be sold as an audio-visual collectible, included narration by Julian himself.

Sir Paul's notes for Hey Jude have a starting price of $30,000 (£22,260), but it's believed bids could more than double that.

Opening up on the item, the notes read: 'The item is brought to life in an even more personal way through Julian Lennon's exclusive audio narration, which is minted as part of this NFT.

'A NFT is a unique and non-interchangeable unit of data stored on the blockchain. Julian Lennon is the sole owner of the physical item.

'The winner of this item will share in that exclusivity of Lennon history as the sole owner of the NFT.'

Meanwhile, the cape is starting at $8,000 (£5,928), the Afghan coat's starting bid will be $6,000 (£4,446), and the guitars are all starting at $4,000 (£2,964).

Part of the money raised from the sale will be donated to Julian's own White Feather Foundation, which helps to provide access to clean water in developing nations.

His mother Cynthia died in April 2015 after a 'short but brave' battle with cancer while his father was shot dead in 1980.

NFTs are now being tipped to become the digital answer to collectables, and some of them are already being sold for millions of dollars.

Sometimes pronounced 'nifties', they are similar to cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum in that they live on blockchain networks - a decentralized, distributed ledger that records transactions of digital assets.

But unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, they cannot be exchanged for another. The digital assets have collectors value, and can represent items including still images, GIFs, videos, music and more.

While NFTs have been around for years, their popularity has grown rapidly in recent times thanks to a few sales with very high price tags and attention from top investors including Mark Cuban.

Last year, a man paid $208,000 for a NFT with a clip of LeBron James dunking through an auction by NBA Top Shot, which mints basketball highlights into NFTs.

A whole new venue for NFT sales opened last February when

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