From Visa to Budweiser: Big brands take NFTs seriously

Budweiser jumped proudly aboard the NFT train and it’s not the only big name to have done it this week.

On Tuesday, the beer giant changed its Twitter profile to a hand-drawn beer rocket NFT, which was purchased for 8 ETH (about $ 26,000), and they also registered Ethereum’s domain name beer.eth for 30 ETH (nearly $ 100,000). NFT was designed by artist Tom Sachs as part of the Rocket Factory NFT series .

Budweiser is just one of the well-known names that has signaled the adoption of NFTs in recent days; the introduction of unique blockchain tokens that can represent any physical or digital media, including works of art, video clips or music.

On Monday, the payments corporation reached the headlines after paying $ 165,000 for CryptoPunk , one of 2017. from the 10,000 pixel avatar series of the year. CryptoPunk is now sold for over a million dollars every day, and Visa’s announcement made it clear that the company considers CryptoPunk to be its art: Today, as we enter the new era of NFT commerce, Visa welcomes our collection CryptoPunk # 7610, ”Visa tweeted on Twitter.

Over the last 60 years, Visa has built a collection of historic commerce artifacts – from early paper credit cards to the zip-zap machine. Today, as we enter a new era of NFT-commerce, Visa welcomes CryptoPunk #7610 to our collection. https://t.co/XoPFfwxUiu

— VisaNews (@VisaNews) August 23, 2021

And on Friday, Arizona Iced Tea announced that it had purchased the Bored Ape Yacht Club from the Bored Ape NFT series. The beverage brand plans to use its Ape in its marketing materials. (Collection creator Yuga Labs later told Decrypt that Arizona Iced Tea used its trademark logo in an “inappropriate” way in its tweet, a sign that interesting copyright disputes are likely to arise in the NFT world soon.)

BIG NEWS, ZONIE'S! AriZona APED into the @BoredApeYC – We're stoked to introduce our Bored Ape #NFT & have some huge things planned!

Shout out to @BoredApeComic & check out https://t.co/dIYyQOZEWT Issue #1 for a huge surprise reveal. #NFTcommunity #BAYC #BoredApeYC #NFT pic.twitter.com/qs3CVNCGl3

— AriZona Iced Tea (@DrinkAriZona) August 20, 2021

All this gives a clear indication that this second wave of the NFT boom is different from March and April, when brands such as Charmin, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut rushed to display their NFTs depicting their own products. Visa, by purchasing NFT from its existing hot collection, shows that a large credit card company – a company that is extremely careful about branding any partner – sees the benefits of using CryptoPunk in terms of artistic value, financial gain and a positive reputation.

Visa wants access to the NFT community , which could be seen as a positive sign for Visa’s future adoption of cryptography in general. The same goes for Budweiser’s .eth domain name registration.

While NFT prices may certainly fall again, brands with large wallets may have a more lasting impact in the NFT space: how quickly will we see brands paying royalties to owners of high-profile rare NFTs? And what big brand is next that joins the NFT boom?