Remember POGs? They’re Back—in Ethereum NFT Form

The mid-‘90s playground sensation is back in action: POGs are making a comeback, this time pairing the physical milk caps and slammers with NFT discs and an online game.

POGs first entered Web3 about a year ago, first launching on the Solana blockchain with a handful of collections, including digital collectibles featuring Solana’s Okay Bears project.

But this week, POGs will make the jump over to Ethereum with a new NFT mint that corresponds with the debut of an online version of the classic POG-slamming game experience.

“Now that we’re going to Ethereum, it does feel like we’re kind of stepping up to the major leagues,” POGs NFT founder Kyler Frisbee told Decrypt, citing increased trading volume and liquidity compared to the Solana NFT space.

POGs NFT, a subsidiary of The World POG Federation, has tapped Origin Protocol’s Origin Story NFT platform to develop a custom marketplace for the drop. On April 6, the company will launch 3,800 Ethereum NFTs spanning a mix of POGs and slammers with unique artwork for each, at a price of 0.049 ETH (about $90 as of this writing).

The NFTs can be used within a slate of upcoming Ethereum-based video games, which are set to launch this summer. The first play-to-earn POG game, called Stack and Slam, will first debut on Solana this week. Frisbee said that it mimics the classic slammer-tossing playground experience, relying on a combination of timing, skill, and luck for players to succeed.

Some of the NFTs will feature artwork from popular NFT projects like the Bored Ape Yacht Club and Moonbirds. Bored Ape holders can use or license out their owned artwork for commercial products, while the open-source Moonbirds artwork is free for anyone to commercialize. Other POGs NFTs are based on projects like Neo Tokyo and Viva La Vandal.

Beyond this week’s mint, Frisbee and team plan to release physical packs of Web3 project-themed POGs in May via a token-gated platform, letting owners of POG NFTs access the marketplace to purchase limited edition POGs based on the NFTs.

From there, Frisbee has a number of ideas on how to further embrace Web3 with POGs. He envisions a potential play-for-keeps physical game that uses NFC chips within the POGs themselves, and then automatically transfers the tokenized ownership from the loser’s wallet into the winner’s.

The goal with POGs NFTs, he said, is to deliver digital collectibles that feed into video games, but also pair with the physical POGs experience.

He teased plans to bring physical POGs back in a big way, with the NFT expansion and celebrity partners intended to “bring the right buzz for when the official distribution of those POGs comes back globally.”