NEW DELHI :
NFT marketplace Social Swag said its latest auction of cricket collectibles related to sports movie 83 was sold out for ₹10 lakh within an hour of their debut on the platform.
Movie producers, actors and singers in India have rushed to various NFT marketplaces to cash in on the NFT frenzy and launch collectibles on movie scenes, posters, songs and dialogues. NFTs for 83 have been minted on the Polygon blockchain platform. They include autographed physical cricket memorabilia, video moments, digital avatars, and unseen posters and images.
According to Social Swag, the new NFTs have generated much interest in tier-I and tier-II cities. “While we were expecting purchases mainly from metros, cities such as Jabalpur, Kanpur, Nagpur, Thiruvananthapuram, and Solapur, took the lead in accepting the buzzing culture of NFTs,” said Atharva Sabnis, chief executive of NFT Labs, the technology partner of Social Swag.
Social Swag isn’t the first company to take advantage of Bollywood’s virality. In November, the auction of veteran Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan’s NFT Collection by a platform called BeyondLife Club fetched $966,000. The collection included Bachchan’s father’s poems, called the Madhushala NFT collection, which alone sold for $756,000, and posters of the 1975 movie Sholay.
Actors Salman Khan, Rajinikanth, and Sunny Leone and singer Sonu Nigam are among leading artistes whose movie and song NFTs have been released in the past few months.
Some of the actors have gone a step ahead and are building their Metaverse platforms, where they can interact directly with fans using digital avatars and sell their NFTs. For example, NFT platform Fantico is building a Metaverse game with the digital avatar of actor-turned-politician Kamal Haasan.
NFTs are digital assets with unique identification codes and can be minted, purchased and transferred using blockchains. Essentially, they are unique blockchain tokens, akin to cryptocurrency, which can be linked to any digital file, including artwork, images, videos and are used to establish proof of ownership. NFTs aren’t “fungible”, unlike cryptos, meaning one token can’t replace another on the blockchain.
According to NFT market tracker DappRadar, the total value of global NFT sales in 2021 soared to $25 billion from $94.9 million in 2020.
Last month, actor Salman Khan-backed NFT platform BollyCoin, in partnership with NFT marketplace NFTically, dropped the first in a series of large NFT collectibles from the actor’s 2010 movie Dabangg.
Apart from the movie industry, the NFT frenzy has also swept the cricket fraternity. Several former and current Indian cricketers, including Sunil Gavaskar, Yuvraj Singh and Rohit Sharma, have released the NFT collection of their most cherished moments and milestones.
According to 2021 Google search trends, NFT was more searched on the search engine than cryptos for the first time. Sabnis pointed out that India has always been obsessed with cricket and Bollywood. “With NFTs, for the first time, people can own a piece of history—a possibility no one would have imagined before Web 3.0,” he added.
