Latin American NFTs are roaring amid the cryptocurrency boom

November 2, 2022

By Sharan Kaur Phillora

Millions of Latin Americans are turning to cryptocurrencies as a form of safety due to high inflation, with stablecoins dominating the market. According to Chainalysis’ 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and Ecuador are among the top 20 nations with the highest crypto adoption rates.

Here’s what we know: 

Through initiatives like Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks, which are now highly sought-after collectibles, NFTs have reached mainstream audiences in industrialized countries. Contrarily, Latin American businesses are investing in NFT use cases like helping out local artists, letting customers resell airline tickets, or giving to charitable groups.

A decentralized platform called Enigma.art primarily offers NFT development services to well-known traditional Latin American artists in fields like fine arts and music. Through NFTs’ meet-and-greet tickets, collectible cards, or original compositions, it links artists with their followers.

“We wanted to purchase an original work by a Latin American artist when we first entered the cryptosphere in 2021 and learned what an NFT was, but there weren’t many available. Therefore, we developed our own infrastructure to enable NFTs”, according to Facundo Migoya, CEO of Enigma.art.

NFTs in Latin America, however, is not just about the most upscale industries, but local NFT firms work to foster innovation in more established businesses. In August, the low-cost Argentine airline Flybondi began selling 2.5 million tickets on TravelX, a marketplace for tokenized travel goods. These tickets are tokenized when purchased and turned into non-fungible tokens known as NFTickets.

Currently, the NFTickets can be bought with fiat currency or USDC using a wallet made in TravelX, BinancePay, or, most recently, Lemon, a Latin American cryptocurrency exchange. Every transaction generates a 2% commission for both TravelX and Flybondi.

With more than a million users in Argentina and Brazil, Lemon debuted in August the largest NFT collection to date, giving each of its users a distinctive NFT avatar. Lemon CEO Marcelo Cavazzoli said, “We realized that NFTs around the world were primarily utilized for speculative purposes and that Latin Americans found the existing process to obtain an NFT onerous, so we extended free access to NFTs to all of our users.”

Pequeos Pasos (Little Steps), an international non-governmental organization (NGO) that creates integration programs for families in at-risk areas around Argentina, launched its first NFT collection of digital drawings created by children enrolled in integration programs in May.

According to Matas Ronconi, president of Pequeos Pasos, “the NFT project is aimed for people to get connected with the organization in a more tangible way and afterwards enjoy incentives like special participation in our events.”

About the author

Sharan Kaur Phillora’s thirst for knowledge has led her to study many different subjects, including NFTs and Blockchain technology – two emerging technologies that will change how we interact with each other in the future. When she isn’t exploring a new idea or concept, she enjoys reading literary masterpieces.