Another step of NFTs into the world of football. After the token fans of Inter and Roma, Fiorentina also enters the world of non-fungible tokens as a protagonist. The team owned by Rocco Commisso stands selling on the Genuino platform over 2 thousand collectibles in NFT. Inside the store you can buy them as packs of digital stickers, which depict different types of collectible gadgets.
Among these, there are 95 team uniforms which, however, have a particularity. Their digital version is in fact linked to the physical one by a smart patch, a kind of QR code. And whoever buys the NFT is entitled to receive the corresponding T-shirt as well. Sales began in August and will continue in these weeks: the next batch is scheduled for September 20.
Tutorial
How to create an NFT and how to sell it online
by Emanuele Capone
A record month
August was a record month for NFTs worldwide. In thirty days, they registered on OpenSea, the most important non-fungible token exchange platform sales of nearly $ 2 billion. As of March 2021, just 5 months earlier, there had been exchanges for just 150 million.
Leading the market was a novelty not so different from that launched by Fiorentina in our country. Between May and June of this year, a series of images that portrayed some bored monkeys, with expressions and masks of all kinds. Many have begun to use them as photos for their social profile, as if to underline their belonging to some kind of community, of interest group.
The bored monkey club
And indeed those who use the bored monkey profile picture have something in common. They are all part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, “A limited edition collection of NFT that also guarantees membership in a swampy monkey club.” The official website opened at the end of April this year. It offered for sale as non-fungible tokens 10,000 different designs of bored monkeys at a price of around $ 2,000 each. It took about 24 hours for the designs to run out: a few days later it was possible to find them on the secondary market for about 10 times their initial price. The star of the NBA Stephen Curry bought one for $ 180,000.
Why would anyone spend so much money on an avatar to use on Twitter? There is not only speculation, will and the bet to pay back the initial investment: “When you buy a bored monkey – the website reads – you are not simply buying an avatar or a rare work of art. You are gaining access to a club whose benefits and offers will increase over time ”.
For example, someone who buys a bored monkey also buys the right to use that particular image for marketing purposes or for print t-shirts, mugs or objects. But more than anything else, buy membership in that specific club. An exclusive club, which meets through the Discord messaging app, on which the Bored Ape group already has 13,000 members.
cryptoart
The first NFT in history sold by Sotheby’s: “It is comparable to a Picasso”
by Emanuele Capone
The mania
Bored Monkeys are just the most famous of a series of NFT collections that are becoming a real craze in the United States. There are the PudgyPenguins, the Doge Pirates, there is Tom Sachs Rocket Factory. All of these experiments have a number of characteristics in common. To begin with, they are NFT collections with a limited number of pieces, secondly they have a recognizable iconography, tell a story even only through the strokes used for the drawing. Last but not least, the purchase gives the opportunity to be part of a sort of club, a micro-community that recognizes itself in the values of the history that that collection tells.
The Tom Sachs Rocket Factory, for example, is an experiment that merges the digital space with the physical one. It is a platform within which it is possible to purchase three components as an NFT to build a space rocket. That space rocket, once built, becomes in turn a non-fungible token and remains the property of its designer. For those who wish, the collection also offers the possibility of a launch into physical space. On August 29, the first 10 rockets were launched on Governor Island, New York, in an event widely documented and reported on the project’s official social accounts.
A digital identity
In conclusion, the world of NFTs goes far beyond art, at least as we have understood it to date. The possibility of possession, of concrete certification of belonging, opens up new possibilities. It opens up to the creation of communities, of spaces for comparison and discussion with a sort of entrance ticket, or in any case with a right of registration.
At the end of July, Mark Zuckerberg told in an interview with the American journalist Casey Newton of the Metaverse, a possible future of an Internet in which the digital space will be like a sort of world in its own right, parallel but in continuous connection with our physical world. NFTs may be one of the clues to this future path. One of the NFT collections launched in recent months is called Evaverse. Its feature is that the purchase of a non-fungible token gives access, through the avatar that you have chosen to buy, to a PC game similar to Fortnite, a world where you can play, talk to other users, organize rooms. In other words, a Metaverse, which in the future other NFT collections may choose to enter.
Just as in physical space what we possess defines us, in the same way non-fungible tokens represent – and perhaps will represent – a trading currency within the Internet of the future. A key to design our identity, to define who we are and the people we relate to.
Francesco Marino has a digital culture project on Instagram called Pills of the Future Present.
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