Basketball players, pop singers and now high-end vinyl toys – lots of different groups are trying out non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on Ethereum as a new way to monetize.
Superplastic is a company that makes artistic vinyl toys for the collectibles market. It’s debuting two new figures on the Winklevoss-owned Nifty Gateway, from Guggimon and Janky, two artists with strong Instagram followings.
We might be seeing fresh interest from the non-crypto world because of the sector’s growth. NonFungible.com released its 2020 report on NFT data for 2020, finding over 220,000 active wallets in the space and counting 31,504 sellers and 74,529 buyers for the year. The data site captured $251 million in NFT trade volume.
Obviously, mainstream appeal should grow the sector further, and aiming to attract celebrities has always been part of Nifty Gateway’s strategy. Beyond social media’s newly famous, the mainstream stars are starting to get interested as well. Recently, both Lindsay Lohan and Grimes, the pop star and mother of Elon Musk’s latest child, have announced token offerings.
It might be tough to compete with analog celebrities for mindshare, but Superplastic has the advantage of a dedicated following of people who like to speculate on aesthetic goods.
Odds are some number of those fans will be persuaded to check out this whole digital art with provable provenance thing. Let’s just hope the company has a plan for preparing its followers to understand what gas fees are.
Each artist will auction one NFT each: “Electric Scream Dream” by Janky and “Well, That Was Fucking Weird!” by Guggimon. There will also be six SuperKranky figures designed together by both artists.This isn’t the first foray of a toy company into crypto or NFTs. In fact, CryptoKaiju has offered analog toys whose ownership corresponds with an ERC-721 token on Ethereum for a while now. Superplastic has no plans to connect these digital offerings with a real-world toy.
