October 10, 2022
By Anjali Kochhar
The non-fungible tokens (NFT) craze has become global with the boom the digital assets got last year. From celebrity tweets and videos promoting NFTs to millions of fans, who buy the merchandise they sell, NFTs have exploded in popularity as well as price over the past year.
NFTs are blockchain-based assets that are unique due to their identifying information recorded in smart contracts. Globally, celebrities have tokenized everything from music, and photographs to artwork using NFTs.
Popular rapper Snoop Dogg released his NFT collection called “A Journey with the Dogg” featuring his memories from his early years, NFT-inspired artwork, an original track called “NFT,” and “Snoop Dogge Coins.”
Similarly, Queen of pop culture and entrepreneur Paris Hilton also dropped her first NFT with Super Plastic, a vinyl toy and digital collectables company backed by the likes of Google Ventures and Justin Timberlake.
Musician Shawn Mendes joined the NFT bandwagon and launched an NFT based on his album, ‘Wonder’ with Genies at the popular marketplace OpenSea.
Globally, there are many celebrities who have successfully become a part of this craze.
In India, prominent actor Amitabh Bachchan rolled out NFTs which sold for Rs 7 crore. The collectables included his autographed posters, his father’s famous poem Madhushala and a few of his other works.
Earlier this year, NFTs of Ranveer Singh-starrer sports drama 83 were sold for Rs 10 lakh. Last year, actor Salman Khan launched NFTs of his Dabangg series. Radhe Shyam, the film starring Prabhas and Pooja Hegde, collaborated with ngageN, an invitation-only platform for brands and creators to list their unique assets for potential buyers, and rolled out the NFTs for the film.
For Bollywood celebrities, NFTs are proving to be an extension of their identity as they cash in on their brand value. Fans are getting curious to get their hands on the limited-edition collectables of their favourite celebrities proving that there may come a time when Bollywood and NFTs can go hand in hand.
What lies in the future?
Arijit Mukherjee, the founder of the NFT marketplace Yunometa, says, “Celebrities and NFTs are made for each other. NFTs provide an engaging new medium for celebs to interact and be an integral part of fans’ lives while NFTs themselves become more well known through the reach and power of celebs. Not just interaction, celebs can create whole new worlds and experiences for fans to be a part of their lives or upcoming movies or sporting worlds in a manner that was never possible before.”
“With more and more innovation in the space, the future for collabs between celebs and cryptos is only going to get even more intertwined,” he added.
Vikram R Singh, Founder and CEO of blockchain development firm Antier, believes that the deepening their connection with their fans via their own NFTs, celebrities are embracing the NFT marketplace – pieces of digital media bought with cryptocurrency. From Silicon Valley’s elite to the mass of the Internet, the possibilities of digital art authenticity and ownership have gripped onlookers – with celebrities having hopped on the virtual train, adding their own contributions to be auctioned off.
“With discovering creative ways to utilise crypto as payment and showcase utility in the long-term potential of digital assets, crypto investors continue to grapple with aggressive interest rate hikes and a plummeting liquidity crunch that has pushed major players into financial difficulty. Offering a seamlessly cheaper cost-effective transaction on a global scale, while NFTs have a great future in the country with the developing laws and regulations, the future of the celeb-NFT collaboration is something to watch out for,” he said.
NFTs and their commercialization are rapidly democratising digital resource creation and trade. These digital assets have enabled free designers, specialists, business people, and organisations to effortlessly gain access to enormous and flourishing global business sectors for various digital resources. This is propelling overall economic development.
Ramkumar Subramaniam, CEO and Co-founder of NFT marketplace GuardianLink, believes that fans would love to have a personalized and meaningful interaction with their favorite celebrities, and it can be facilitated by the combination of NFTs and metaverses.
“The innovation has just begun. The future, for all you know, would be centered around metaverses and would be digital-first. The need for maintaining privacy and the urge to make celebrity events more accessible will move a lot of events into the metaverse. While in the near future, we can expect some events to happen in the metaverse with their physical equivalents still happening in the real world,” he said.
About the author
Anjali Kochhar covers cryptocurrency stories in India as well as globally. Having been in the field of media and journalism for over three years now, she has developed a sharp news sense and works hard to present information that goes beyond the obvious. She is an avid reader and loves writing on a wide range of subjects.
