NFTs
NFTs are more than a marketing tool for companies
Disclosure: The views and opinions expressed here belong solely to the author and do not represent the views and opinions of the crypto.news editorial.
In company meeting rooms, silence revolution is underway as executives and creative teams find new ways to utilize unique blockchain-based tokens in their marketing strategies. Dubbed digital collectibles – a term meant to simplify the concept for consumers – non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are being seamlessly integrated into the products of major corporations to breathe new life into customers’ virtual and physical experiences.
Gone are the days when digital images inscribed on blockchains were at the center of pop culture; now that the market it fellNFTs have found a new home – companies’ marketing departments, relegated to capturing cash for loyalty programs and digital collectibles displayed like public trophies in blockchain wallets.
Take Mastercard partnership with crypto neobank Hi or Inclusion of NFTs by Coca-Cola in global advertising campaigns, for example. While these collectibles are primarily intended to promote customer loyalty and engagement, coupled with the fact that trading is discouraged, they have inadvertently classified NFTs as mere marketing tools in the eyes of many.
However, suggesting that this is the extent of the NFT’s usefulness does a disservice to the technology and its potential – and perhaps to human ingenuity. We have barely scratched the surface of NFT utility. Reducing NFTs to mere marketing tools is ignoring the implications and versatility they can offer beyond their current applications.
The big question is whether NFTs are just destined to become mere souvenirs and trophies. To appreciate the value of any technology, it is important to appreciate how it contributes to the way we create, consume and exchange value in the digital age. For example, one could have argued that AI would only be limited to chatbots before ChatGPT exploded onto the scene and took conversational AI to a whole new level.
As blockchain technology continues to evolve and mature, those committed to building honest and sustainable NFTs for practical use are bound to (quietly but surely) rise above the fray. Trends come and go – and there’s no denying that some NFT projects have been driven more by hype and speculation than genuine utility, innovation or artistic merit. Amid the noise, those who dedicate themselves completely to their products and their community will ultimately change things for the better.
We are witnessing the emergence of use cases and creative applications for NFTs that span different industries – fashion, fitness, gaming and more. Just as brands strategically leverage influencers to align with their vision and values, NFTs, beyond their role as money-making tools, should be integrated into brand strategies with a similar approach. It’s not simply about checking a box; it’s about activating communities and promoting a shared vision. NFTs must be consistent with the brand’s overarching strategy and purpose, ensuring authenticity and avoiding the trap of becoming just another marketing gimmick. By aligning NFT usage with brand values and authentically engaging communities, brands can unlock new avenues for creativity, empowerment and community building in the digital economy.
Take games, for example; The introduction of NFTs into web3 games serves as a poignant reminder of the importance of prioritizing fun and engagement above all else. Just as the heart of games lies in immersive experiences and captivating narratives, the real value of NFTs in this context goes beyond mere possession of tokens. While there is a rush to tokenize game assets and encourage ownership, the essence of gaming – the joy of exploration, the thrill of competition, and the camaraderie of community – must remain paramount. NFTs should enhance the gaming experience, not overshadow it.
In fact, lessons learned from web3 games can be extrapolated to other industries. Just as gamers seek fun and fulfillment, consumers crave meaningful interactions and experiences. Integrating NFTs into marketing strategies – and more – should focus on community activation, shared vision, and authenticity. The use of NFTs must align with brands’ overarching strategies and purposes, fostering genuine connections and adding value to the consumer experience. By embracing the fundamentals of fun and engagement, brands can unlock the full potential of NFTs, creating immersive experiences that resonate deeply with their audiences.
At their core, NFTs are a testament to human creativity – a way to reshape our approach to art, technology and commerce. To fully realize their potential, we must transcend the superficial and narrow view of NFTs as mere profit-driven innovations. It’s time to authentically embrace NFTs for their ability to drive positive social and economic change – and this requires a return to basics, uniting web2 and web3 in strategy and utility. Only genuine appreciation of the NFT’s creative potential in human experiences reveals its genuine usefulness.
Shiti Rastogi Manghani
Shiti Rastogi Manghani is an award-winning business leader with 14 years of experience in 11 countries managing multi-million dollar projects. Previously, Manghani served FSL as chief operating officer and was recently named executive director to oversee overall operations for FSL’s product suite. Manghani is an electronics engineer with an MBA in marketing. She founded her computer vision-based AI start-up, which is in the top 50 wellbeing start-ups in the UK (ranked 14th) and in the top 100 healthcare companies in the UK. Previously, she worked on launching the Wall Street Journal’s digital arm in India and building powerful brands at PepsiCo US.
NFTs
RTFKT Announces Project Animus Reveal, Launches Egg Unboxing Event Amid Mixed Reactions | NFT CULTURE | NFT News | Web3 Culture
RTFKT, the innovative creator-led company renowned for its cutting-edge sneakers and metaverse collectibles, has officially unveiled its highly anticipated collection, Project Animus. This project marks a significant milestone in RTFKT’s journey, introducing a new dimension to its digital universe after a long period of development. However, the initial market response has been disappointing, with the revealed Animi trading at a floor price of 0.05 ETH, significantly lower than the eggs’ floor price of 0.09 ETH.
The Genesis of the Project Animus
Initially introduced in October 2022, Project Animus introduces a unique ecosystem of digital creatures called Animi. These Animi are designed to enhance Clone X’s avatars, offering an immersive and engaging experience for the community. The recent reveal showcased a diverse range of Animi species, each with distinct design traits and elemental attributes, breaking away from traditional trait-based rarity systems.
A New Digital Frontier: The History and Evolution of Project Animus
The Animus Project is RTFKT’s latest intellectual property, promising to revolutionize the NFT space with its unique digital creatures. The journey kicked off on October 8, 2022, with an interactive teaser event called “The Eggsperience.” This livestream event allowed attendees to explore a virtual Animus Research Facility, generating intrigue and excitement among the community.
Renowned artist Takashi Murakami played a significant role in the project, revealing the first Murakami-themed Animus creature, Saisei, on April 30, 2023. This collaboration added a layer of artistic prestige to the project, further elevating its status within the NFT community.
Animus Egg Incubation: A Journey from Egg to Animi
Clone X NFT holders had the opportunity to claim an Animus Egg until March 1, 2024. This was followed by the Animus Egg Hatching event, which ran from May 7 to June 4, 2024. During this period, holders of several RTFKT NFTs, including Clone X, Space Pod, Loot Pod, Exo Pod, and Lux Pod, were able to use a points-based system to increase their chances of hatching rarer Animi. The limited supply of Project Animus Eggs is capped at 20,000, with no public sale planned.
Mixed market reception
Despite the excitement and innovative features, the market reaction to the reveal of Project Animus has been lukewarm. Animi is currently trading at a floor price of 0.05 ETH, significantly lower than the eggs’ floor price of 0.09 ETH. This discrepancy has led to disappointment among some collectors who had high expectations for the project.
What Awaits Us: The Future of Project Animus
Following the reveal, RTFKT plans to release a collection of exclusive Animus Artist Edition characters. Holders of Clone X Artist Edition NFTs are guaranteed to get one of these special editions. The distribution will include 88 Special Edition Animus, with 8 Mythic (Dragon Sakura), 40 Shiny, and 40 Ghost Animus. The odds of receiving a Special Edition Animus are the same for all Eggs hatched, regardless of the points accumulated.
The remaining Animus characters will be distributed among unhatched Eggs, encompassing Special Edition Animus, as well as Cosmic Animus and Murakami Element from Generation 1, Generation 2, and Generation 3.
Conclusion
RTFKT’s Project Animus represents a bold step forward in the NFT space, combining cutting-edge technology with artistic collaboration to create an immersive and innovative digital ecosystem. However, the initial market reception highlights the challenges of living up to high expectations in the ever-evolving NFT landscape. As the project continues to evolve, it promises to deliver unique experiences and opportunities for its community, solidifying RTFKT’s position as a leader in the metaverse and digital collectibles arena.
Summary: RTFKT has unveiled Project Animus, introducing a unique ecosystem of digital creatures called Animi designed to enhance Clone X avatars. Despite the excitement, market response has been mixed, with Animi trading at a lower floor price than eggs. The project kicked off with an interactive event in October 2022, featuring collaborations with artist Takashi Murakami. Following the reveal, RTFKT will release special edition Animus characters. The total supply of Animus Eggs is limited to 20,000, with no public sale planned.
NFTs
The Olympics have reportedly ditched Mario and Sonic games in favor of mobile and NFTs
The long and historic partnership between Nintendo and Sega to create video games for the Olympics reportedly ended in 2020 as event organizers sought opportunities elsewhere.
Lee Cocker, who served as executive producer on several Mario & Sonic Olympics titles, said Eurogamer the International Olympic Committee let the licensing agreement lapse because it “wanted to look at other partners, NFTs and esports.”
“Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [it] “Turn inward and look for other partners so you can get more money,” Cocker added.
The 2024 Summer Olympics kicked off in Paris last week, but there were no Mario & Sonic games available in time for the event to begin – the first time this has happened since the original release in 2007 to coincide with the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.
Over the past two decades, there have been four Mario and Sonic adaptations for the Summer Olympics, as well as two for the Winter Olympics.
This year, instead of a Nintendo/Sega title, the IOC released Olympics Go! Paris 2024, a free-to-play mobile and PC title developed by nWay, which has worked on several Power Rangers games.
Olympics Go! allows players to compete in 12 sports and unlock NFTs from the Paris 2024 digital pin collection.
The original Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games was announced in March 2007 and marked the first time the two mascots – once archrivals in the console wars of the 1990s – appeared together in a game.
NFTs
DraftKings abruptly shuts down NFT operation, leaving collectors panicking over vast holdings of digital tokens
DraftKings, the daily fantasy sports and sports betting company, abruptly shut down a program called Reignmakers on Tuesday, posting a notice on its website and associated app and sending a mass email to some subset of its user base. Reignmakers, which the company launched in 2021, offered pay-to-play competitions in NFL football, PGA Tour golf and UFC mixed martial arts. The decision to eliminate the entire program, DraftKings says, was not made lightly but was forced “due to recent legal developments.”
DraftKings has yet to specify what “recent legal developments” are troubling its now-dead Reignmakers product. The company was sued in U.S. District Court in 2023 by a Reignmakers player named Justin Dufoe, who accuses the company of dealing in unregistered securities, taking advantage of relatively unsophisticated “retail investors,” and failing to market and support Reignmakers to the degree necessary to return to its users the financial benefits expected. DraftKings filed a motion in September to dismiss Dufoe’s complaint, but that motion was denied on July 2. A scheduling conference was held by the parties on July 29; Reignmakers was permanently shut down on July 30. A DraftKings spokesperson reached by Defector on Wednesday declined to confirm whether Dufoe’s complaint is the “recent legal development” that forced the company’s hand.
Users of the Reignmakers NFL product, who in recent days began murmuring on social channels about a notable lack of DraftKings activity so close to the start of the NFL preseason schedule, were caught off guard and, in some cases, devastated by the news. Members of the DraftKings Discord server, where all Reignmakers-related channels were abruptly shut down and locked following the announcement, flooded a general channel in various states of panic, sharing news, theorizing, lamenting, and, in some cases, openly worrying about whether it would be possible to recoup any decent fraction of the genuinely impressive sums of money they had invested in this DraftKings product.
Reignmakers is nominally a daily fantasy contest—users build lineups of players and then pit those lineups against other users’ lineups for cash prizes—but it’s actually a distributor of nonfungible digital tokens (NFTs), originated and sold by DraftKings, and then frequently resold on a dedicated secondary marketplace also hosted by DraftKings. At the lineup-building level, Reignmakers functions like a card-collecting game, with artificial scarcity driving the prices of the most coveted cards to insane, eye-popping heights. Reignmakers NFTs are tiered and offered in timed drops designed to heighten the sense of scarcity. A user can enter a lower-tier contest using a collection of NFTs that may have cost a few hundred dollars in total (or that were earned by purchasing random packs of NFTs that offer generally low odds of scoring top assets) and throw their lot in with hundreds of casual users competing for relatively unimpressive rewards. Random packs at the lowest tier would have prices as low as a few dollars; mid-tier cards—Star and Elite tiers, I’d guess—could cost a player upwards of $1,000.
But players interested in hunting down the biggest payouts, not just from games but from leaderboard prizes and other assorted prizes, would need to enter higher-tier games, and to enter the higher-tier games, a user’s collection needed to include higher-tier NFTs. DraftKings ensured that these cards were extremely scarce and could only be purchased directly on the marketplace at prices that any reasonable person would consider utterly insane.
For example, the highest-tier Reignmaker contests (called the Reignmakers tier, of course) have in the past been limited to listings with at least two of the highest-tier, rarest NFTs (also the Reignmaker tier) plus three NFTs from the second-highest tier (Legendary). NFTs at these tiers are expensive. Not just expensive in the way that, like, a steak dinner is expensive, but expensive in the way that buying even one of them should trigger a mandatory visit to a gambling addiction counselor, if not sirens and a straitjacket. Back in 2022a Reignmaker-level Ja’Marr Chase NFT from something called the Field Pass Promo Set could be purchased directly from the DraftKings Reignmaker Marketplace for a whopping $32,100.
Reignmakers users purchased NFTs at various levels with the expectation that owning them would convey better odds of winning contests hosted on DraftKings. This was the gamification element of Reignmakers, which emerged several months after DraftKings began trading and minting its NFTs. But as with all NFTs, a very large part of the real appeal for its buyers was the expectation, however insane, that these worthless, virtually worthless, infinitely duplicable digital images would increase in value over time. Now that both the Reignmakers game and the Reignmakers marketplace have been shut down, Reignmakers NFT holders are worried that their investments may have suddenly lost all monetary value. One Discord user described Tuesday as “a bad day to wake up and realize you have $2,000 worth of unopened NFL Rookie Packs”; Another user asked the group if they should expect “a refund” on the $10,000 they’ve already spent on Reignmakers NFTs this year. A pessimistic Reddit user posted tuesday that they would sue DraftKings if they were forced to take a total loss on a Reignmakers NFT collection worth approximately $100,000.
The game (scam?) was built to make numbers like these not only possible, but somewhat easily achievable. A user who intended to compete from a position of strength in multiple overlapping high-profile contests at the same time, and who had been in the blockchain madhouse for a period of years, could easily have spent six figures on Reignmakers NFTs. DraftKings used non-gaming incentives to entice players to spend more and more money, much like casinos give away free suites to players who over-bet on blackjack. Another Reddit user lamented the loss of the additional prizes and ranking bonuses he had hoped to earn in the upcoming NFL season by having a portfolio of NFTs that had reached the highest levels of value and prestige. “I was already loaded up on 2024 creation tokens and rookie debut cards,” said this Reignmakers userwho claimed his portfolio was finally “close to the top 250 overall.”
Dufoe’s complaint says the NFTs minted by DraftKings for Reignmakers qualify as securities, function like securities, and should be regulated as securities. In its motion to dismiss, DraftKings attempted to position its NFTs as game pieces — eye-wateringly expensive, yes, but essentially the same thing as Magic: The Gathering cards or Monopoly hotels. The court, in resolving these arguments, applied what’s known as “the Howey test,” referencing a case from 1946 in which the U.S. Supreme Court established a standard for determining whether a specific instrument qualifies as an investment contract. Judge Dennis J. Casper, in ruling against DraftKings’ motion, concluded that Dufoe could plausibly argue that Reignmakers’ NFT transactions represent “the pooling of assets from multiple investors in such a manner that all share in the profits and risks of the enterprise,” arguing that DraftKings’ absolute control over the game and marketplace effectively binds the financial interests of the company and the buyers, the latter of whom depend on the viability of both for their NFTs to retain any value.
Reignmakers users are different from Monopoly players in at least one crucial way: A person who buys a Monopoly board has no expectation from Hasbro that those little red and green pieces will appreciate in value. It’s a game! No matter what any hysterically conflicted party may say to the contrary, that’s not what NFT collecting is. DraftKings had been selling Reignmakers NFTs for months before they were gamified, and Dufoe, in his complaint, cites public comments made by DraftKings spokespeople that seem to explicitly position Reignmakers NFTs as assets with independent monetary value beyond their utility in Reignmakers contests. Judge Casper, in his ruling on the motion to dismiss, cites a Twitter account associated with a podcast run by DraftKings CEO Matthew Kalish, who in a tweet described NFTs as “the opportunity to invest in startups, artists, operations, and entrepreneurs all at once.” This is probably the kind of thing that NFT peddlers should stop saying. This advice assumes, of course, that NFTs will continue to exist as instruments on the other side of this and other lawsuits.
DraftKings has posted a worryingly sparse FAQ at the bottom of the your ad Tuesday, anticipating but largely failing to address questions from players who see this as yet another in a long line of brutal blockchain rug pulls. In a hilarious reversal of existing Reignmakers policy, Reignmakers users are now allowed by DraftKings to withdraw their Reignmakers NFTs from their DraftKings portfolios and into their personal NFT wallets, where those NFTs will have precisely zero value, to anyone, for the rest of all time. There’s also vague language about Reignmakers users having the option to “relinquish” their NFTs back to DraftKings in exchange for “cash payments,” subject to “certain conditions” and according to an as-yet-unspecified formula that will take into account, among other things, the “size and quality” of a player’s collection.
Reignmakers users are not optimistic. Those who claim to have been victims of other blockchain market crashes are warning their peers on Discord and Reddit to expect payouts that amount to pennies on the dollar; in the absence of any clarifying information, users are unsure whether cashing out their NFTs from Reignmakers to their personal NFT wallets, for reasons that completely pass any and all understanding, would effectively preclude the possibility of delivering these silly digital tokens back to DraftKings. It remains to be seen what exactly DraftKings has in mind with the “certain conditions” attached to the delivery process. There is much that has yet to be resolved. A DraftKings spokesperson contacted by Defector indicated that more time would be needed to answer a list of specific questions and issued a statement noting that it is “in DraftKings’ DNA to innovate and disrupt to provide the best possible gaming experiences for our customers.” The original complaint is embedded below.
Do you know anything about the demise of Reignmakers, either from the consumer side or from the DraftKings side? We’d love to hear from you. Get it in touch!
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NFTs
There Will Be No More ‘Mario & Sonic’ Olympics Because of NFTs
Nintendo and SEGA have been teaming up with the Olympics for several years now in the popular Mario & sonic in the Olympic Games series, but a new report claims the International Olympic Committee has abandoned the series in favor of new deals in eSports and NFTs.
According to Eurogamer“A veteran behind the series,” Lee Cocker, told the outlet that the IOC chose not to renew its license with SEGA and Nintendo, letting it expire in 2020. “They wanted to look at other partners and NFTs and eSports,” Cocker told Eurogamer. “Basically, the IOC wanted to bring [it] turn inward and look for other partners so they could get more money.”
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games is a series that has been running since 2008, with six main games covering the regular and Winter Olympics. In the games, players could control various characters from the Mario and Sonic franchises and compete in Olympic sporting events.
It’s no secret that NFTs are a big part of this year’s Paris 2024 Olympics. Olympics Go! Paris 2024 is a mobile and mobile-connected game your site states that players can “join the excitement of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games with nWay’s officially licensed, commemorative NFT Digital Pins collection honoring Paris 2024!”
As for eSports, Saudi Arabia will host the ESports Olympic Games in 2025. This is part of a partnership with the Saudi National Olympic Committee (NOC) that is expected to last for the next 12 years and is expected to feature regular events.
IOC President Thomas Bach said: “By partnering with the Saudi NOC, we also ensure that Olympic values are respected, in particular with regard to the game titles on the programme, the promotion of gender equality and the engagement with young audiences who are embracing esports.”
In other news, Someone claimed they’re suing Bandai Namco because Elden Ring is too difficult.
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