Mr Price launches NFTs for nightmare fuel
Earlier this week, Mr Price ran a competition giving away nine non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to his Instagram followers.
The collection, called “NF-Tees”, features a whimsical animated character doing dance moves while wearing different t-shirt designs.
Eight of the NFTs came with a cash prize of R10 000, while one concealed a jackpot of R50 000.
Non-fungible tokens are a type of crypto-asset that contain unique attributes.
Unlike coins like bitcoin and ether which are identical and fungible, NFTs with different properties are not fungible.
Popularized on the Ethereum blockchain as a sort of cryptographic certificate of authenticity for digital artworks, NFTs have been associated with projects such as CryptoKittiesCryptopunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
The technology is also used in “play-to-earn” games such as Axie Infinity, and metaverses such as Decentraland and The Sandbox.
Some projects are also experimenting with using NFTs to store various financial positions, including options contracts and long-term “staking” (a kind of fixed deposit).
Despite their varied uses, NFTs have become synonymous with images or animations traded on marketplaces such as Rarible and Opensea.
Mr Price’s entry into space falls into this category.
To be in with a chance of winning one of the NFTs, fans had to comment on Mr Price’s Instagram page with their most incredible moment of 2022.
They then had to share the post promoting the “NF-Tee” to their Instagram stories and tag Mr Price’s account.
Mr Price’s NFT campaign was handled by Cape Town-based MetaLabs Africa, who have done similar campaigns for Savanna Cider and VW Polo.
In all three cases, MetaLabs created the NFTs on the Polygon blockchain, which acts as a scaling layer for Ethereum.
The Savanna Cider campaign involved a system where NFTs would increase in rank from bronze, to silver, to gold based on how much people laughed during it Comedy Bar Tour.
The tour ran from July 26 to August 26, 2022 and would use a “laugh-o-meter” to measure how much people laughed.
Savanna would randomly distribute NFTs to participants and social media followers who could exchange them for prizes such as PlayStation 5 consoles and cash cards.
However, when looking at transaction data on the blockchain, the campaign did not end up using the NFTs.
The VW Polo campaign was more similar to Mr Price’s, with people entering a competition based on social media to win an NFT.
It issued 100 NFTs over five days, and according to Polygon blockchain transaction data, the tokens were actually distributed.
Five of the NFTs are currently on sale, with the cheapest listed for 0.09 ether (R2300).
However, the records only tell part of the story.
According to Opensea, none of these NFTs have sold yet, and the highest bid from a willing buyer was 0.0059 ether (R150) for VWs Mzansiverse Golden Ball #1 NFT. A potential buyer made the offer two weeks before the NFT was transferred to the winner.
The last set of offers for these NFTs were made on August 24 and 25, with one user offering to buy 16 of them for between 0.003 and 0.005 ether each (roughly R75-R130). None were sold.
Similarly, Mr Price appears to have already transferred all nine NFTs from the campaign to their respective winners.
None are listed for sale, and there have been no offers to buy.
Inspection of the NFT’s metadata shows that Mr Price or MetaLabs Africa have not only stored the animations on a server which they must continue to operate in order for them to be available online.
Instead, the tokens link to resources stored using the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).
IPFS is a peer-to-peer protocol for hosting media on the web. Cloudflare launched an IPFS gateway in 2018, and this year announced IPFS support for the Cloudflare Pages website hosting service.
MetaLabs said Mr Price’s “NF-Tees” would take the clothing retailer into the metaverse, with winners able to use the NFTs as metaverse avatars.
It is not clear which metaverses it will support.
The two major players in the blockchain metaverse are currently Decentraland and The Sandbox, neither of which appear to list Mr Price’s new NFTs.
