VIP+ Webinar: NFT + Sustainability

NFTs have swept the online zeitgeist and continue to be touted by celebrities and cryptocurrency fanatics alike, but are they sustainable?

VIP+ senior media analyst Gavin Bridge sat down with industry leaders to discuss the types of NFT providers that have emerged in this space and explore carbon-neutral options for running all the related blockchain technology in this rapidly evolving landscape.

The all-star cast of speakers included Grant Dexter, co-founder and CEO of Fanaply; Kelly LeValley Hunt, founder and CEO of Mint Gold Dust; Jose Rosero, instigator-at-large for CleanNFTS.org; Max Shand, founder of Serenade; and Boaz Paldi, chief creative officer at United Nations Development Programme.

“My partners and co-founders and I [have] come from building e-commerce stores in the early 2000s,” said Dexter, whose Fanaply is a NFT platform provider that works with the world’s leading sports entertainment and music brands. Years of this work exposed Dexter to the amount of merchandise that often piled up in warehouses, forcing him and his business partners to ponder the environmental impact stemming from the mass production of such merch that ultimately went to waste.

Such concern eventually led to the founding of Fanaply.

“We… wanted to build a frictionless onboarding system because we realized that the vast majority of the world didn’t own cryptocurrency or even know what NFTs were,” explained Dexter. “So, we built sort of this layer on top of the Ethereum network that allows us to have a managed wall on behalf of our users and not incur gas fees or transaction costs associated with mining, [allowing] the fans to enjoy all the upside of NFTs and onboard into the crypto world and crypto wallets when they’re ready.”

“It’s really difficult for platforms to have a say in the outcome of sustainability,” added Hunt, whose Mint Gold Dust platform allows artists to mint their own work and earn royalties via smart contracts.

“All the platforms are cloud-based platforms or decentralized platforms and so the energy sources are so far from the owners of the platform,” she continued. “It’s really difficult to actually dig in and get involved in sustainability. But they have every right to say what their thoughts are, unless they own their own data center and they run special ways of creating energy like hydro-electricity or… geothermal electricity. It’s really difficult to get involved as far as a platform goes.”

Watch the hour-long webinar enough, and stay tuned for more VIP+ webinars in the future!