According to a recent Forbes article, Visa has purchased its first NFT a renowned CryptoPunk NFTs for $150,000. This is the first time the digital payments giant has dipped its toes into the metaverse, an online world of virtual reality.
CryptoPunk 7610 is the name of the pixelated NFT artwork. It is one of 10,000 one-of-a-kind works of art, 3,840 of which are females.
There will never be more than 10,000 NFTs, and ownership can be verified and demonstrated on the blockchain thanks to the NFT’s unique hash.
Visa chose Anchorage, a fully regulated custodian bank, to hold the 49.5 ETH paid for the NFT, and it will also hold the digital asset on Visa’s behalf.
Cuy Sheffield, Visa’s head of crypto, said of the transaction:
“We think that NFTs are going to play a really important role in the future of retail and social media, entertainment and commerce. So we wanted to understand first-hand what it takes to acquire, custody and interact with an NFT. We’ve worked with Anchorage to do this so that we can build the expertise and be better positioned to help clients navigate this space.”
Visa, according to Sheffield, intends to buy additional NFTs and carve out a niche in the metaverse:
“We envision there could be a future where your crypto address becomes as important as your mailing address. In the same way, Visa’s been here through shifts of commerce before, we’re really excited to help drive this new shift of commerce in the future.”
Diogo Monica, president and co-founder of Anchorage Digital, described how his bank’s digital vault was as safe as any traditional bank vault:
“Instead of a traditional bank with an actual vault behind one of those very heavy blinded doors, it is stored behind a very heavily blinded digital door, which is the security that Anchorage guarantees,”
There is fertile ground for Visa and Anchorage to step in and give services to the institutional top end of crypto, with NFT sales of collections like CryptoPunks hitting a sales volume of $752 million and blockchain games like Axie Infinity reaching $1 billion in sales.
As Visa’s Sheffield pointed out:
“We’re really excited to see what developers build and how we can help merchants, brands and platforms connect and interact with NFT commerce.”
