NBCUniversal and Aptos Labs team up for Nicolas Cage’s ‘Renfield’

Nicolas Cage will star as Dracula in “Renfield,” which hits theaters on April 14. Matt Winkelmeyer—Getty Images

Even the hundred-year-old Dracula can learn about new-fangled technology.

Aptos Labs, the developer behind the Aptos blockchain, announced Friday that it has partnered with NBCUniversal on a Web3 game to publish the upcoming film Renfield which features Nicolas Cage, everyone’s favorite best worst actor, as Dracula.

The game, which is online and accessible via either a QR code or URL, is already live. Gameplay involves players looking through a series of stylized images based on scenes from the film to identify which ones have hidden “flaws”. (Renfield, Dracula’s assistant and the film’s focus, apparently eats insects during the film to give himself superpowers.)

After players have identified the bugs is when Aptos comes into play. Users enter a digital raffle for a chance to win three digital collectibles, which include movie posters and cartoon scenes from the film. And those unlucky enough not to find the secret bugs still get a collectible. These non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are minted on the Aptos blockchain and users can access them through Petra, a wallet built by Aptos.

“We know audiences just want to be connected. They want story and fun, and no barriers to connecting with their fandom,” Greg Reed, vice president of technology partnerships at Universal Pictures, said in a statement. “Our job is to leverage high-performance , scalable networks.”

NBCUniversal’s partnership with Aptos Labs marks the media giant’s first major foray into Web3, according to Mo Shaikh, co-founder and CEO of Aptos Labs. And it’s another coup for the new blockchain developer as it continues to have high-profile partnerships for its protocol less than a year and a half after it went public.

“This partnership was really born out of a shared interest in exploring Web3 and blockchain technology to really improve the fan experience,” said Shaikh Fortune.

Shaikh and co-founder Avery Ching publicly released the Aptos blockchain in October 2022. They had previously been at Meta (formerly Facebook) and worked on Diem (formerly Libra), the social media titan’s stablecoin project that was jettisoned in January 2022 when it met significant opposition from legislators and regulators in the US and Europe.

After the collapse of Diem, Shaikh and Ching, who specifically worked on Diem’s ​​stablecoin wallet, went off on their own and used technology from their days at Meta to create Aptos, a layer-1 blockchain secured by proof-of-stake.

Despite the questionable token drop, Aptos soon took off. Its token APT has a market cap of roughly $2.35 billion as of late Thursday afternoon. The blockchain has some of the highest transaction speeds among protocols, per cryptanalysis firm Messari. And in addition to NBCUniversal, Aptos Labs has announced partnerships with Google Cloud as well as MoonPay, the fintech firm building crypto payment infrastructure.