MUMBAI, October 24 (Reuters) – Indian celebrities in Bollywood and cricket are increasingly releasing digital memorabilia via non-fungible tokens (NFTs), hoping to raise thousands of dollars by leveraging the growing interest in these assets.

NFTs are a type of digital asset that uses the blockchain to record ownership of items such as pictures, videos, and other collectibles. Their skyrocketing popularity has baffled many, but the explosive growth shows no signs of slowing down. Read more

Bollywood superstars such as Amitabh Bachchan and Salman khan plan to launch NFTs soon. While Bachchan’s NFTs will feature autographed posters of his films, Khan sparked excitement on his Twitter account by letting his 43 million followers know about the planned launch of NFT.

“NFTs are currently foreign to Bollywood, but I’m sure they (movie stars) will see this as another platform on which they can use their existing content and generate revenue,” Bollycoin’s Ayaan Agnihotri said. , an NFT marketplace for Bollywood assets.

Agnihotri said that within days of launching this month, his platform sold 8 million of the 20 million available so-called “BollyCoins”, crypto tokens that can be used to purchase NFTs when launched. . A BollyCoin is worth 10 US cents.

But it is still early days for NFT celebrities in India.

Indian cricketer Dinesh Karthik is auctioning off a digital art reel of a cricket match where he hit a winning six on the last ball for around 5 ethereums, a digital currency, worth around $ 20,000. But he hasn’t received any offers yet.

“NFT has come a long way in the West over the past year, with iconic basketball moments being digitally purchased by fans, which gave us the idea,” Karthik told Reuters.

Others have been successful. One of India’s top fashion designers, Manish Malhotra, recently sold NFTs of digital sketches of some of his most famous designs for $ 4,000 each. Malhotra’s website shows that some of her bridal outfits can be purchased for less than $ 2,500 to $ 3,500.

The rise of NFTs has baffled many who say it makes little sense to spend large sums of money on items that don’t physically exist and can simply be viewed online.

Still, NFT’s global sales volumes soared to $ 10.7 billion in the third quarter of 2021, an eight-fold increase from the previous quarter, data from market tracker DappRadar showed. Read more .

Vishakha Singh, vice president of NFTs at Indian crypto exchange WazirX, said celebrity participation in the segment is expected to create excitement in the space.

This, she said, “is great for the ecosystem. It will help us raise awareness of this new, game-changing world of digital assets,” Singh said.

Reporting by Nupur Anand and Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by Aditya Kalra and Kim Coghill

Our standards: Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.