Do NFTs Have a Place in the Hospitality World?
Dek goes here…
It would take more space than we have in DIningOut (not to mention in our brains) to exhaustively define what, exactly, a non-fungible token (NFT) is. But essentially, it’s a digital asset purchased with cryptocurrency like Ethereum. News about the world’s first “NFT restaurant,” New York City’s Flyfish Club, has made waves. Add digital marketplaces like BlockBar selling rare wine and spirits as NFTs, and it seems the tech is increasingly moving out of the, well, ether, and into the real world.
We spoke to Charlie Berger, co-founder of Denver Beer Co., which offered an NFT for sale last July. The brewery listed its NFT on the marketplace OpenSea, where a handful of bidders pushed the list price of 0.5 Ethereum ($1,156.31 at the time of purchase) up to 4.33 Ethereum, or $10,013.60. The winning bidder can redeem their token at any Denver Beer taproom for up to four beers per day for life. Berger admits he didn’t have a grand strategy when he got in on the game: “Well, we thought NFTs were cool. We had no idea what we were doing,” he says. He speculates that if Denver Beer Co. had auctioned off beer for life in “real” money, it may well have sold for even more, “but it wouldn’t have been as interesting.”
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