The NFT dam has clearly broken as companies launch one right after the other: Lamborghini and Blockbuster are just two of the names wading into this space recently.
Standing for nonfungible tokens, NFTs are a way to assert ownership over a piece of online content like art or music — celebrities like Martha Stewart used them to auction off past photo shoots and stories they wrote.
On Thursday, the luxury Italian carmaker Lamborghini also announced that it would be launching a series of five NFTs known as Automobili Lamborghini — created by Swiss artist Fabian Oefner, they will have a space theme (the images feature cars that morph into rockets) and be auctioned off in partnership with NFT Pro and Sotheby’s.
The auction will take place between February 1 and 4 and last "75 hours and 50 minutes, the exact time it took Apollo 11 to leave Earth and enter the moon's orbit."
Lamborghini
Blockbuster Is Doing It Too
Even though it filed for bankruptcy in 2010 and now has one remaining store in the country (at its peak in 2004, that number was at over 9,000), video rental company Blockbuster is reportedly also preparing to launch an NFT.
On Wednesday, trademark attorney Josh Gerben took to Twitter (TWTR) to write that Blockbuster filed a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office application for a cryptocurrency, an NFT marketplace and a space in the metaverse (a new version of the internet through which people move with avatars.)
While the rise of the internet killed the entire industry on which it built its business, the Blockbuster brand retains a loyal base of fans who track the history of the brand online.
Rumors over how Dish Network, which bought the Blockbuster brand at auction for $320 million in 2011, could capitalize on this nostalgia such have been swirling online for years.
So Why Are NFTs So Big?
The recent rush to make NFTs comes as no surprise given the profitability of the market — popular ones like the Bored Ape Yacht Club can sell for millions online. They are popular not just among fans of the specific subject or creator but investors as value can soar fast, many wealthy ones use bots to track when certain NFTs hit the market and immediately snap them up.
One of the main marketplaces for NFT trading, OpenSea reached a valuation of $13.3 billion just four years after launching in 2017. But so far, celebrity and brand NFTs have so far failed to generate the kind of million-dollar price tags as some of the more artistic ones.
Most recently, an NFT collection launched by Melania Trump had been set at a starting price of $250,000 in Solana currency. When the auction brought in only a few bids and the currency fell, Trump came out with roughly $163,800.
That, however, hasn't stopped everyone from Nike (NKE) to TikTok from trying to launch their own NFTs.
"Momentum is very real," financial adviser Timothy Collins wrote for TheStreet's RealMoney. "The right celebrity tweet or whole entry can happen fast and draw buyers in fast."
