Reports said that the NBA’s Chicago Bulls have partnered with leading e-commerce platform Shopify to launch non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Harley Finklestein, the president of Shopify, posted a tweet about the NFT drop.
It has been reported that according to Finklestein, the Chicago Bulls franchise is one Shopify's first partners to launch an NFT storefront on the platform, with Shopify's president noting the service will only be available to a “select few” in its formative stages.
The report said that Shopify integrated Sweet’s NFT marketplace in May, allowing its customers to issue and sell nonfungible tokens directly through the popular e-commerce interface. Sweet supports NFTs issued via Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard, Simple Ledger Protocol’s SLP token standard, and Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain.
Likewise, the Chicago Bulls’ NFTs were minted on Flow, which also hosts the officially licensed NBA Topshot tokenized highlight collectibles. The “Bulls Legacy Collection” will be released over six drops, with each token celebrating the team’s six iconic championship wins between 1991 and 1998.
The first NFT was launched on July 26 and has already sold out, with the second token launch the later day. The remaining four NFTs are scheduled for launch over the next four days. Despite the NFT sector recently cooling off, NFT sales surpassed $2.5 billion for the first half of 2021.
On July 21, it was reported that the popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea, had closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.5 billion, indicating VC investors remain bullish on the nonfungible sector.
Thus, retail investors still appear eager to get their hands on prized NFTs too, with Tyson Fury’s first NFT launch seeing a single token fetch almost $1 million in a July 16 auction, while more than 32,000 people signed up to participate in contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s latest NFT drop last week.
Source: Cointelegraph