The operator of international bank cards Visa announced on Monday the purchase of its own collection of “commercial artifacts” NFT CryptoPunks.
VISA has an extensive collection of art and antiques related to commerce, including the early paper credit cards and devices that merchants used to record credit card transactions before the advent of electronic point-of-sale terminals.
Visa last week bought CryptoPunks Collectible Token # 7610, one of 3,840 female punks, for approximately $ 150,000. CryptoPunks are original works of crypto art in the form of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, created in 2017 by Larva Labs.
The collection consists of 10,000 pixel images. Each of the CryptoPunks has personality and unique combination of graphic details. It is noteworthy that according to Larva Labs, NFT CryptoPunk # 7610 was acquired by the previous owner (July 26, 2021) for “only” $ 51,000. And on August 19, 3 weeks later, Visa was resold for $ 149,939.
When asked by The Block why Visa included CryptoPunks in the collection, CryptoPunks’ head of cryptocurrency projects Cuy Sheffield said that CryptoPunks “became a pioneer of technology and a wave of NFT commercialization”, so it wanted to be in the trend of crypto industry innovations and own an NFT crypto-bank. He explained that the decision was not so much for a specific token as for CryptoPunks in general, given that this is a historic project in the NFT industry.
“NFT is the intersection of culture and commerce. We felt that CryptoPunks would be a great addition to our collection of artifacts that can reflect and reflect the past, present and future of commerce, ”Sheffield said.
Visa believes that the development of NFT projects will have a huge impact on the future of global commerce. Sheffield likened the creation of the NFT marketplace to the dawn of e-commerce. Just as e-commerce has enabled small businesses to sell online and cater to the needs of customers around the world, NFTs have enabled small businesses to use the public blockchain to create digital goods that can be instantly delivered to a wallet anywhere in the world.
Visa’s own cryptocurrency team was formed in 2019 and has since taken several initiatives in this area.
“We are seeing quite significant interest from buyers and sellers, brands and content platforms looking to find their place in the NFT space. We are committed to helping customers navigate how to participate in the NFT commerce ecosystem, ”Sheffield said.
The bank card operator has published a white paper on NFT, explaining to companies how they can integrate NFT into their platforms and how Visa can help them. Recently, Visa became the first major payment network to use stablecoins for transactions.
