Who will be the ‘Shopify of NFTs’? Turns out that it might actually end up being… well, Shopify. The company’s president shared some brief details recently that show the firm’s intent to support NFTs at a larger scale.
The Bears? Or The… Chicago Bulls
In a tweet to kick off this week, Shopify president Harley Finkelstein shared that the company’s first integrated NFT support has come with the NBA’s Chicago Bulls NFT release. Less than 600 Bulls’ NFTs will go to market, with the first batch released today and the remainder unveiled throughout the remainder of this week. The initial batch today sold out in 90 seconds, according to Bulls Senior Product Manager Matt Moreno.
Despite no formal press release yet from the Shopify team, Finkelstein has shared that “a select few” Shopify customers have been allowed the ability to integrate tools to streamline NFT sales. “Before Shopify offered this capability,” said Finkelstein in a tweet, “merchants would have to sell through a 3rd party marketplace aka less control of the sale and customer relationship. Once again we are putting the power back into the hands of merchants and meeting customers how and where they want to buy.”
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Meeting Of The Marketplaces
NFT infrastructure projects are growing on a major mainstream level at rapid pace. Just last week, sports betting platform DraftKings announced a partnership with Tom Brady’s Autograph.io. The deal will have DraftKings release a new ‘DraftKings Marketplace’ where customers can buy, sell and trade sports NFTs. Also on the newswire last week was OpenSea’s $100M Series B funding, valuing the firm at around $1.5B, and Polygon’s $100M gaming NFT dedicated fund. The NFT infrastructure investment cycle is in full swing.
In Shopify’s case, it’s difficult to gauge which blockchains will be supported or utilized. With the aforementioned Chicago Bulls release, the NFTs are being released via the Flow Blockchain. However, this is almost to be expected given the NBA’s relationship with Dapper Labs; the Flow chain is a Dapper Labs’ project, and Dapper also runs NBA Top Shot, the league’s licensed NFT product. It remains to be seen which other chains, if any, Shopify will support. In the meantime, today’s news is a major win for Dapper Labs and the Flow Blockchain team.
Regardless of when mainstream NFTs start hitting consumer marketplaces, the brief information from Finkelstein’s tweets show that it is abundantly clear that having streamlined support for NFT sales is clearly top-of-mind for Shopify.
Shopify will clearly support the Flow Blockchain in it's merchant toolkit, as this chain was used on the recent Chicago Bulls NFT release. | Source: FLOW-USD on TradingView.com
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Featured image from Pixabay, Charts from TradingView.com