Non-fungible tokens or NFTs are getting some support from a reality star who has some clout with users.
Paris Hilton, who has a Twitter following of some 16.9 million people, tweeted her enthusiasm for NFTs April 7. Calling them the “future of the creator economy,” Hilton explained how these are unique vehicles for artists and content creators to make money and participate in a new digital marketplace.
“You can already buy virtual real estate using NFTs,” Hilton exclaimed, as reported at Cointelegraph. “In the virtual pet universe Axie Infinity, someone paid $1.5 million worth of crypto for nine plots! You can also buy virtual cars.”
In a blog post on the topic, Hilton further outlined how the pandemic changed our views of celebrity and fan interactions, and how that leads to changes in virtual worlds. Specifically, she mentioned avatars, which are virtual impressions of an individual in virtual worlds. Avatars, she suggests, become more important when people are locked away from each other physically.
“Some of these applications might even change the way we live,” Hilton wrote. “What if we could use NFTs as collateral for physical items? Or as a way to trade for them?”
However, NFT detractors say that these digital assets are all too often based on flimsy domain systems and URL pointers that are anything but permanent. In the eyes of many people around the world, NFTs are seen as a particularly chimerical type of asset. People are warming up to cryptocurrency and decentralized finance in general, but NFTs have an additional layer (or two) of uncertainty built-in.
Regardless, lots of prominent artists are getting on the NFT bandwagon, including the famed “Snoop Dogg,” and many, like the artist Beeple who unloaded an NFT for $69 million at Christie’s, are selling their tokenized assets for significant prices. So it’s worth looking at this market when you have fintech holdings that are generalized, or anything in the realm of the digital arts.
