Mixed fortunes of celebrities who jumped on NFT craze
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Paris (AFP) – Sports, movie and music stars have all flocked to the NFT market to buy pictures of monkeys, support business partners or even launch their own art collections.
Although the crypto sector suffers from a slump in sales and declining values and spreading fraud, celebrities continue to sign up for mania for so-called Non-Fungible Tokens.
Borte ape
Bored Ape Yacht Club is the bottom point for NFT collectibles.
It contains cartoon images that have been replicated thousands of times with algorithm-generated variations.
The first collection of 10,000 computer-generated images has been followed by several other generations and many millions of forgeries.
For the fans, they are a status symbol, a key to an exclusive club where ordinary people can mingle with famous and wealthy.
Brazilian soccer player Neymar and tennis legend Serena Williams tweeted their monkey photos the same day in January.
American talk show host Jimmy Fallon and socialist Paris Hilton showed their monkeys on TV.
Madonna declared on Instagram in March that she had “entered MetaVerse” with a purchase of a monkey, allegedly for more than 500,000 dollars.
She followed musicians Justin Bieber, Eminem and Snoop Dogg, basketball fans Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry, and actors including Gwyneth Paltrow.
For NFT critics, these monkeys symbolize everything that is wrong in the crypto world – fundamentally worthless, but sold for huge sums of value based on hype.
And in the end, these celebrities do not own the monkey pictures in any traditional sense – anyone can download and use the pictures.
What they own is essentially a digital receipt linked to the image.
But celebrity support is important.
The monkeys, along with comic book collections like CryptoPunks, seem to cope with the crash better than other parts of the crypto sector.
Solo assignment
NFT celebrity enthusiasts have gone much deeper into the industry than just buying monkey pictures – many have created their own NFT collections, with mixed results.
The American musician Grimes came in early, and managed to raise almost 6 million dollars for some fantasy-inspired art last year.
However, many of these NFTs are now almost worthless, and are sold for fractions of the original prices – when they sell at all.
Other collections have not even managed to get off the ground. Wrestler John Cena sold only a handful of NFTs from a collection he put together last year with WWE.
He admitted that it was a “catastrophic failure”.
Skateboarder Tony Hawk has been more successful with sales, but at the expense of admiration from some of his fans.
He announced on Twitter last year that he would sell versions of his well-known tricks as NFTs, which gave answers from “Stop this Tony” to “Tony, no, not you too”.
Hawk has not mentioned the project on the Twitter page, although he still has NFTs.
Only business
One of the mainstays of the relationship between celebrity and NFT is the old-fashioned brand approval.
This week, the French megastar football player Kylian Mbappe became the last star to sign as “ambassador” and invest in the French start-up company Sorare.
The company runs a fantasy football game where players can buy NFTs in sports card style.
Serena Williams, along with footballers Gerard Pique and Rio Ferdinand, have already invested in the game.
And not to be outdone, last week’s most famous football player, Cristiano Ronaldo, announced a partnership with Binance, the world’s largest crypto company.
The offerings will apparently include designs made in collaboration with Ronaldo, who said in a statement that he looked forward to “bringing unique experiences and access through this NFT platform”.
© 2022 AFP
