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Beer enters the NFT universe
For beer lovers, the news did not have to go unnoticed. Budweiser bought a non-fungible token (NFT) representing a space rocket adorned with its logo for use as an image on Twitter, and seized the domain name beer.eth.
The Anheuser-Busch subsidiary caught the attention of the crypto community last Wednesday after downloading a Bud-themed rocket, as part of the project Rocket Factory NFT by artist Tom Sachs.
According to the records of the site OpenSea, the beer producer bought a Budweiser NFT rocket on August 24 for 8 Ether (ETH), or about $ 25,704. The company used the image “Life of the Party“, depicting three cans of beer making up the body of a rocket, for his official profile picture on Twitter.
She also tweeted three emojis depicting space rockets, often used by stock buyers memes and fans of cryptocurrencies to mean that an asset ” goes to the moon”.
“Budweiser takes its first steps into the NFT universe. We are excited to support Tom Sachs and his Rocket Factory project and join this amazing community“.
NFTs, these digital assets such as works of art, audio clips, video clips, sports cards tweets, are linked to blockchain networks and are expanding rapidly since the beginning of the year. Each NFT is therefore unique and almost impossible to modify or duplicate, making them popular with artists. Plainly, anyone online can see the NFTs, but there is only one verified owner of the token on the blockchain.
The Budweiser purchase and subsequent profile picture change resulted in an increase in the value of Tom Sachs ‘ fully assembled rockets: Rocket Factory NFT.
What is Tom Sachs’s project: Rocket Factory ?
Project Rocket Factory was launched in early August and allows everyone buy parts of an NFT rocket, which they can then create in the real world if all parts of an NFT rocket are assembled. The physical rockets are then assembled and launched, according to the Medium page of the project, the first flights took place on August 28.
Rocket Factory NFT has already released 3,000 branded components for rockets to assemble.
“The Rocket Factory, and all the NFTs it generates, are works of art.These works of art are based on the sculpture and painting that Tom has been making for more than thirty years. We are proud to announce Tom Sachs ‘ Genesis NFT collection“.
The NFT collection is a partnership with Tom Sachs, a well-known sculptor and contemporary artist in New York.
Little physical reminder: an assembled rocket needs three components, a nose cone, a body and a tailplane. Each component was sold at a price of 0.15 ETH plus gas.
The components represent popular brands like USPS, NASA, Skippy peanut butter, 7-Eleven, Trojan condoms, Sweet ‘N Low, Yoda and Brian from Family Guy and of course Budweiser.
There is 344 rockets for sale on OpenSea with a floor price of 14.8 ETH. The cheapest individual component is on sale at 4.25 ETH. A total of 45 “Frankenrockets” that feature three components with different logos are for sale with a floor price of 20 ETH.
The company recently shared a rarity chart, showing how many components of each brand were made during the NFT drop. There was 90 of each Budweiser rocket component, which means that 90 fully assembled Budweiser rockets could be assembled if someone bought the components.
Other brands like Coca-Cola and Apple were rarer, with only one copy of each component released, making possible a single hypothetical rocket fully assembled for each company.
Ten physical versions of the built rockets flew over New York City on Saturday, August 28. Other rockets will be launched on other dates.
Budweiser thus paid 8 pieces of ether for the rocket. It is also known that the beer brewer has bought the beer domain name.eth for 30 ether (worth $ 94,000 at the time of writing), under which the rocket and other NFTs are stored on cryptographic platforms.
After Visa and Arizona Iced Tea that paved the way
So Budweiser is to date the latest big company to enter the NFT and crypto space, joining companies like Coca Cola and Marvel in creating and selling these digital assets to consumers.
Earlier in the week, Visa and Arizona Iced Tea had paved the way for the NFTs.
Visa a declared paid $ 150,000 for a CryptoPunk series NFT, whileArizona Iced Tea purchased a Bored Ape Yacht Club series NFT in order to use his digital monkey in terms of marketing.
Budweiser’s profile picture change follows Visa’s decision to change its Twitter profile picture to its Visa News account, which has more than 118,000 followers, after purchasing a CryptoPunk.
Two big companies like Visa and Budweiser that buy NFTs could bring greater institutionalization in the NFT market, whose lasting power could be questioned while some spoke of bubble.
The popularity of NFTs has continued to grow throughout 2021 and the market shows no signs of slowing down. Nearly a billion dollars have been spent on NFT through more than 300,000 sales in the last 30 days, according to data from nonfungible.com. We still remember the record sale of the artist Beeple that had ignited the canvas and made it possible to officially launch the NFT movement. In many sectors such as art or luxury, these non-fungible tokens open a new way.
To end this article on an ironic note, in an article published a year ago by our friends at Cointelegraph, and entitled “If Cryptocurrency were Beer”, they precisely compared Bud to Bitcoin for the following reasons :
- Budweiser, an American lager, is an extremely well-known beer, available in establishments from east to west and beyond. It ultimately remains the simple and reliable drink appreciated by many
- Bitcoin performs a similar function in the cryptocurrency world. As the first publicly available cryptocurrency, it’s not the most sophisticated and up-to-date thing, but users know what they’re getting when they use it : brand reliability and persistence.
