Filmstars, cricketers join NFT bandwagon
NEW DELHI: The surge in popularity of NFTS, essentially blockchain-certified copies of digital art, has Indian celebrities, including Bollywood stars and cricketers, among those joining in to create and sell non-fungible tokens.
On August 30, Amitabh Bachchan became the first Bollywood star to join the craze for NFTS, short for non-fungible tokens.
His NFTS, which include an autographed poster of Sholay and poems narrated by him, will be hosted on a platform called Beyondlife.club in November this year.
He is not alone. Interest from Bollywood has been growing ever since Bachchan’s involvement, according to Toshendra Sharma, founder of Nftically, a software-as-a-service (SAAS) service for NFT marketplaces.
While he did not name the people he has been in conversation with, Sharma said he is getting requests from musicians, scriptwriters, directors, actors and others involved in the Indian film industry.
Cricketers, too, have shown interest. In the past two months, two NFT platforms dedicated to cricket have been announced in India. Last month, homegrown
digital collectibles platform Rario announced that it had partnered with cricketers Zaheer Khan and South African Faf du Plessis for the platform.
Singapore-based blockchain platform Cricket Foundation, too, announced an NFT platform dedicated to cricket earlier this month. It is backed by cricketers V.V.S. Laxman, Parthiv Patel, Wasim Akram, R.P. Singh and Piyush Chawla and others. The platform uses homegrown blockchain firm Zebi’s platform to run its marketplace.
NFTS are digital tokens akin to cryptocurrencies, except that they are non-fungible, which means that one NFT cannot replace another in a blockchain. As a result, a person buying an NFT can sell it to someone else or exchange it for another NFT, but the blockchain platform will always reveal the creator’s name and subsequent owners.