NFTs go big in Latin America amid a crypto boom
With an increasing number of economic and political crises in recent years, Latin American citizens have found in crypto a powerful tool to cope with the instability. Now non-fungible tokens (NFT) are flourishing in the region, aiming to solve real problems and not speculation.
High inflation has led millions of Latin Americans to seek refuge in cryptocurrencies, with stablecoins leading the way. According to Mastercard, 51% of consumers in the region have made at least one transaction with crypto. Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador are among the top 20 countries with the greatest crypto adoption, according to Chainalysis’ 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index.
NFTs have reached mainstream audiences in developed countries through projects including Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks, which have now become highly sought after collectibles. Latin American companies, on the other hand, are investing in NFT use cases such as supporting local artists, allowing customers to resell airline tickets or donating to non-profit organizations.
Enigma.art is a decentralized platform that mainly provides NFT’s development services for well-known traditional Latin American artists, everything from art to the music industry. It connects artists with their fans through NFTs’ meet-and-greet tickets, trading cards or original songs.
“When we entered the crypto universe in 2021 and discovered what an NFT was, we wanted to buy an original piece by a Latin American artist – until we realized that there were practically none. So we created our own platform to connect fans with artists through NFTs,” Facundo Migoya, Enigma.art CEO, told CoinDesk.
Facundo and Manuel Migoya – aged 21 and 18 respectively – co-founded Enigma.art in 2021. It has more than 5,000 users and at least 1,500 wallets connected. The platform allows users to find and buy original songs from the artists, who receive a royalty percentage of the purchase, separate the voice from each of the different instruments and then mix them differently to create a new track.
The platform currently works with artists such as Marta Minujin, an internationally known conceptual artist from Argentina who sold her first NFT for 24 ETH (approximately $30,720). Or Bizarrap, an Argentinian music producer who reached number one on Spotify’s top 50 global ranking and already sold his first NFT for 100 ETH ($128,000), part of a larger NFT pool in the making.
“We continue to create and develop new ways for fans to invest in their favorite artists, with early access and shared ownership of the artist’s new songs through, for example, NFTs,” added Migoya.
But NFTs in Latin America are not just about the fanciest industries, as regional NFT companies are trying to generate innovation in more traditional sectors.
In August, TravelX, a marketplace for tokenized travel products, began offering 2.5 million airline tickets from Argentine low-cost airline Flybondi, which are tokenized when purchased and converted into non-fungible tokens called NFTickets.
“When customers bought tickets and then couldn’t take that flight, money was lost,” said Federico Pastori, Flybondi commercial director. “In this way, we create an official secondary market where people can sell and resell them up to three days before the start.”
After purchasing an NFTicket, a customer can auction, sell, transfer, gift or trade them through a peer-to-peer system on TravelX, as the startup’s head of blockchain, Facundo Martin Diaz, told CoinDesk when it launched.
“Imagine if a big event happens, customers can buy multiple tickets and then resell or auction them for double the price, the possibilities with NFTickets are endless,” Pastori added.
NFTickets can currently be purchased with fiat money or USDC through a wallet created in TravelX or through BinancePay and recently with Lemon, a Latin American crypto exchange. Both TravelX and Flybondi receive a 2% commission on each transaction.
A million avatars
Lemon, with more than a million users in Argentina and Brazil, launched in August the largest NFT collection in the world that is updated, creating a unique NFT avatar for each of its users.
“We saw that NFTs around the world were mainly used for speculative purposes, and also that Latin Americans found the existing process to obtain an NFT difficult, so we provided free access to NFTs to all our users,” said Lemon CEO Marcelo Cavazzoli told CoinDesk.
The Avatar NFTs, called “Lemmys”, are unique and randomly generated when users activate them. For now, they cannot be changed, traded or bought, although that will be possible in the near future, Cavazzoli stated, adding that more than 400,000 of the million users have claimed their NFTs.
Taking a more supportive approach, Pequeños Pasos (Little Steps), a non-governmental organization (NGO) with global operations that develops integration programs for families in vulnerable communities around Argentina, launched in May its first NFT collection of digitized drawings made by participating children in integration programs.
“The NFT project is meant for people to get involved in the organization in a more tangible way and later get rewards like special participation in our events,” Matías Ronconi, president of Pequeños Pasos, told CoinDesk.
The Pequeños Pasos NFT project was assisted by Santiago Siri, an Argentinian contributor to the Proof of Humanity project and developer of the Universal Basic Income (UBI) ERC-20 token. So far, it has sold 25 pieces for $50 each through OpenSea.
“NFT adoption is still new in Latin America, but we wanted to be part of it from the beginning,” said Ronconi.
