Spirit Collectors Using NFTs, Meta Can’t Keep Giphy, and Bored Apes Could Crash Your Next Poker Night
Welcome to “This Week in the Metaverse,” where Fortune gathers the most interesting news in the world of NFTs, culture, and the metaverse. Email [email protected] with tips.
The world of luxury wines and spirits has an authenticity problem.
The documentary from 2016 Sour grapes, which centered around a wine counterfeiter who conned collectors out of millions of dollars, showed that when it comes to luxury alcohol, it’s sometimes hard to know what you’re actually buying. In another case, more than a third of a batch of 55 rare vintage Scotch whiskey bottles were found to be fake after being tested by the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Center in 2018.
One company, Blockbar, is trying to solve this problem by selling NFTs linked to collectible bottles of spirits and wine from brands such as Johnnie Walker, Hennessy and Rémy Martin. Instead of buying and selling physical bottles through an auction, collectors can cut out the middleman and use crypto to buy the alcohol as an NFT on Blockbar’s marketplace, CEO and co-founder Dov Falic told Fortune.
This also widens the pool of possible buyers for high-end wine and spirits, Falic said, which could pay off for investors in the long run.
“Luxury wine and spirits have outperformed the S&P 500, outperformed luxury watches, but it’s just such a small space that only certain people have access to,” he said.
It may seem strange not being able to touch a bottle you may have paid hundreds of dollars for, but Falic said it can be a plus for collectors who may not have experience storing alcohol. Blockbar stores the bottles in one of two temperature-controlled rooms (one for wine and one for spirits) in Singapore.
“You just don’t want to store as much value in your home if you look at it as an investment,” he said.
Those collectors who see a wine or spirit as more than just an investment can redeem the NFT for the bottle itself, but Blockbar will then burn the NFT, preventing the buyer from reselling the alcohol on a secondary market (at least through an NFT) .
The artist’s spotlight: Valerii Veduta
Valerii Veduta and his family were displaced after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, but he has lived through the war’s effects much longer.
“I was almost born and raised as an artist in this war,” he told me Fortune.
Veduta comes from a small village in southern Ukraine on a land barrier called the Arabat Spit, which lies between the Crimean Peninsula and the Sea of Azov. When Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014, it created a border right through this land, which he knows well. Veduta took this disputed border as inspiration for his first photo collection, Gray outlinewhich captured non-military items that could look like military equipment at night.
Flash forward to 2022, and Veduta has returned to Kyiv and has just released the NFT project War Times Family Album which depicts the hardships inflicted on his family by the invasion.
The collection, which is for sale on the digital art marketplace Voice, consists of a series of photographs from Kyiv, including a shot of a bombed apartment building near his home and a photo of his wife and son playing cards by a window between air raid alerts.
Veduta developed all the images with Ukrainian soil as a printing pigment to give them a yellowish tint before turning them into NFTs, which reflect their lives during the invasion, he said.
“It involves more of being willing to live,” Veduta said.
In other news:
Metathe social media giant that has dedicated billions to its metaverse endeavors was this week ordered by UK regulators to sell its animation company Giphy. This is the first time Meta has had to pull the plug on one of its acquisitions, and it’s a bump in the road for a company that’s also facing reports of Horizon World’s waning popularity.
Crypto winter has also sent a chill through the metaverse land market, with Bloomberg reporting data from the analytics company WeMeta which shows the average prices for countries i Decentralized country and The sandbox fell by 80% from early November 2021 to early October. Nevertheless, some have taken advantage of the price drop to buy.
Does your company hire a chief office of the metaverser? As Bloomberg reporter Matthew Boyle said it, the companies hiring for this position, like LVMH and P&G, looking for a point person for the effort. These brands are chasing consumers more than they plan for how the metaverse will change how they work. “They’re very much looking at this as a branding opportunity, down the line, a way to get closer to customers,” Boyle said on the Bloomberg Crypto podcast Thursday.
Big fan of poker? What about NFTs? Now you can combine both with Bored Ape Yacht Club-themed playing cards of Bicycle. The more than 130-year-old brand secured Bored Ape #1227 in June and will put the image on the cards sometime next year.
Paris Hilton content company 11:11 Media launched a metaverse experience called Cryptoween i Roblox this week and extended it to The sandbox on Friday. By collecting Halloween candy and playing mini-games, players will enter a raffle that will give them a chance to win the platform’s cryptocurrency SAND and NFT.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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