As Web3 becomes a more prominent part of popular culture, NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have grown to be possibly the most divisive topic in the crypto debate.
An unusual person, Time’s president Keith Grossman, who has spent the past year constructing the 99-year-old media company’s NFT business, TIMEPieces, from the ground up, is able to block out the cacophony on all sides of the debate.
NFTs are distinctive digital goods, such as works of art and sports trading cards, that are validated and saved using blockchain technology. However, given the energy-intensive nature of cryptocurrencies, some view NFTs as overhyped and potentially environmentally destructive. The network that supports ethereum, the second-largest coin, is the foundation for many NFTs.
With the development of the internet, anybody could now watch videos, listen to music, and view photographs for free. People purchase NFTs with the hope that, with the help of blockchain technology, they would be able to demonstrate ownership of a virtual good.
“All it is, is a token that enables blockchain ownership verification. The owner’s ability to manage their personal information is its secondary benefit, according to Grossman, who recently spoke with CNBC.
Owners of the $10 million, 20,000 TIMEPieces token may link their digital wallets to TIME’s website to gain unrestricted access to TIME content and exclusive invites to both online and offline events. Photographs and other digital artwork by 89 up-and-coming Web3 artists, including Julie Pacino, the daughter of actor Al Pacino, Joanne Hollings, and Farokh Sarmad, are among the most well-known tokens in the TIMEPieces collection. Additionally, it has drawn a large number of well-known celebrity collectors, including Anthony Hopkins, Eva Longoria, and Miguel.
TIME puts its recognizable red-frame to every NFT produced by this group of up-and-coming artists, a group that has been hand-selected by the media giant’s creative director, D.W. Pine, in addition to auctioning off unique renditions of their most well-known cover stories. As the company is ready to mark a century of publishing the news-related cover art it is now renowned for, Grossman characterizes it as emphasizing the “next generation of artists.”
According to Grossman, since September, TIME has created, or “dropped,” more than 20,000 TIMEPieces NFTs that are held by roughly 12,000 digital wallets, roughly half of which are linked to Time.com. This has resulted in $10 million in profit for TIME as well as $600,000 generated for various charities.
TIME has collaborated with ethereum-based gaming platform The Sandbox to build TIME Square, a virtual place in the metaverse that will be the brand’s primary hub for hosting virtual events for art and commerce.
The Sandbox is one of the biggest metaverse projects, with a $1.5 billion market value, according to CoinGecko, mostly because it used blockchain technology early on. The Sandbox developer Republic Realm spent $4.3 million to buy a virtual property from Atari in November, setting the record for the most expensive digital land transaction.
Investors have been eager to claim that the usefulness of digital assets will be what gives them long-term worth. Institutional investors have found it challenging to understand this message as the prices of valuable artwork, such the well-known Bored Ape Yacht Club and the similarly touted Crypto Punks, have lately plummeted.
One camp developed around the idea of creating a community that had a set of values and beliefs while this new technology was being adopted, according to Grossman. And yet another one centered on what I would refer to as “greed-based communities”
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