Does a Toddler Need an NFT?
When Olympia Ohanian — the daughter of the tennis player Serena Williams and the internet entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian — was an infant, her parents got her a plastic baby doll. Then they got the doll an Instagram account. Qai Qai, as the doll was named, emerged on the platform in 2018. Though the doll’s feed resembled crime-scene photography — Qai Qai dumped in a sandbox or splayed on asphalt — it also had a delightfully nostalgic quality.
As the doll amassed followers, however, she mutated into a computer-generated cartoon figure with doe eyes. This new Qai Qai could lipsync to viral videos. Eventually the original Qai Qai doll was replaced by one styled after the cartoon version and available for purchase on Amazon. Now, Qai Qai just dropped her first NFT collection.
Qai Qai is part of a movement to drag children’s entertainment into the digital future. She was animated by the tech company Invisible Universe, which develops cartoon-character intellectual property attached to celebrities. And Qai Qai’s NFTs — or nonfungible tokens — were released on Zigazoo, an app for children as young as 3.
Does your toddler need an NFT? Zigazoo says yes. The app’s mission is to “empower kids to shape the very landscape and infrastructure of NFTs and Web3.” Platforms like Zigazoo are building a hype bubble for children and pitching it as a creative outlet, an educational opportunity.
I acquired a set of images of Qai Qai dancing in a tutu. First I had to download Zigazoo, a kind of junior TikTok managed by an adult caregiver. Once you’re inside, the app solicits videos built around anodyne “challenges,” like “Can you sing in another language?”
Every time I opened Zigazoo, I learned that I had earned “Zigabucks,” the platform’s in-app currency, for dutifully visiting every day. Also, I was prompted to care * about Zigazoo’s latest NFT drop:
images featuring JJ, the cartoon infant star of CoComelon, a wildly popular YouTube channel.
The CoComelon NFTs were sold out, so I waited for the Qai Qai NFTs to drop, watching the countdown clock on the Zigazoo app for my moment to “invest.” Qai Qai’s NFTs were selling for $5.99 to $49.99 a pack, with more cash buying you a higher likelihood of acquiring not just a “common” NFT but a “rare” or “legendary” one. I selected a “rare” pack for $19.99 and was rewarded with four still images of Qai Qai and one “rare” repeating video of Qai Qai executing the “Heel Toe Dance.”
My Qai Qai NFT is fine. Like the internet’s many dancing babies before her, she is cute, and buying the digital asset supports a broader project: Serena Williams developed Qai Qai so her daughter’s generation has access to Black dolls. Qai Qai’s early Instagram account exemplified the ability to spin up a weird creative project and share it with the world — not because it will help “teach” you how to invest in cryptocurrencies, but just because you feel like it.
In its in-app explainer, “Why should kids have NFTs?,” Zigazoo laments that “so much about the internet is about consumption,” but states that “the future of the internet is what you can create.” Right now, though, it’s about what you can buy using Zigabucks.