Visa buys “CryptoPunk” NFT for $ 150,000

Visa is the latest major company to jump into the NFT craze.

The payment processor said Monday it bought a “CryptoPunk,” one of thousands of NFT-based digital avatars, for nearly $ 150,000 in Ethereum.

An NFT – which stands for Non-Fungible Token – is a unique digital asset designed to represent ownership of a virtual item. Unlike bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, NFTs cannot be traded identically with another NFT.

Proponents say this makes NFTs scarce, increasing their value. NFTs have often been compared to physical collectibles such as rare trading cards and works of art.

“We believe that NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment and commerce,” Cuy Sheffield, head of crypto at Visa, said in a blog post on Monday.

“To help our customers and partners participate, we need a first-hand understanding of the infrastructure requirements for a global brand to purchase, store and operate an NFT.”

Sheffield said the CryptoPunks have become a “cultural icon for the crypto community”.

“With our CryptoPunk purchase, we are stepping foot first,” he said. “This is just the start of our work in this space.”

Anchorage, a federally chartered digital asset bank, made the purchase easier, Visa said.

Several large companies have recently experimented with NFTs.

Christie’s has auctioned several NFTs, some of which are worth millions of dollars. The auction house set records in March when an image created by digital artist Beeple sold for $ 69 million.

Meanwhile, a number of media publications, including CNN, The New York Times, and Fortune magazine, have sold their own NFTs.

But some critics are skeptical of NFTs. Although these tokens represent a digital certificate of ownership, buyers do not own the underlying object and internet users can still view associated media online. Some people even stole the work of other artists and continued to sell them as NFT.

“The buyer of Beeple’s $ 69 million NFT artwork, ‘Everydays – The First 5000 Days’, owns the unique token,” said Adam Rendle, partner at Taylor Wessing law firm, in an article by blog.

“They do not, however, own any copyright or other intellectual property rights in the digital work itself. They may not distribute or otherwise market the depicted asset.”