After Amitabh Bachchan, Sunny Leone Joins NFT Bandwagon

As the non-fungible token (NFT) craze takes over celebrities the world over, Bollywood actress Sunny Leone has rolled out her own NFTs through Silicon Valley-based Mintdropz. The update comes days after legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan revealed his plan to roll out his NFT collection through BeyondLife.club.

Leone has set up a website ‘sunnyleonenft.com’ to share her collection crafted, designed — costumes and animation — by artists from across the world. While Big B’s collection is set to be launched in November, Leone is effectively the first Bollywood celebrity to roll out NFTs.

She, however, has not divulged details on the number and kind of the NFTs.

Explaining what prompted her move, Leone said that she believes crypto is the future of the world.

“NFTs give me an opportunity to express myself with art. Each one of my NFTs will be 100% unique from one another and will have different levels of rarity – rare, super rare, and ultra-rare. Each NFT will be able to be used later in the future to unlock content and maybe even experiences with me. It’s important to me that we create an NFT collection that lives longer than just a 1-time release,” the actress said.

Founded in 2020 by Robin Birla, Ryan Kumar, Karan Sharma, and Sunny Sharma, the platform allows creators to set up websites, profiles and social media enabling selling NFT collectables directly to fans. The artists can also sell merchandise and other content on their personalized platforms in exchange for Ethereum.

Only second to Bitcoin in market capitalization, Ethereum is a cryptocurrency. Currently, 1 Ether is equal to INR 2.88L.

What is an NFT?

An NFT (Non-Fungible Token), bought and sold online, frequently with cryptocurrency is generally encoded with the same underlying software as many cryptos – Blockchain. It is a digital asset that represents real-world objects like art, music, in-game items and videos. Once an NFT sells, the creator receives an amount in cryptocurrency. He/She also receives a commission on each subsequent sale of the NFT.

Unlike cryptocurrencies, which can be exchanged with one another, each NFT is unique and hence cannot be exchanged with another item. Moreover, while cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin can be broken down into smaller units such as Satoshi i.e. 100-millionth of a bitcoin, NFTs cannot be broken down in the same way but exist as a whole. The Blockchain phenomenon has already recorded around $2.5 Bn in sales globally.

Celebrities Joining The NFTs Bandwagon

Other celebrities that have ventured into NFTs include comedian Ellen Degeneres, rapper Snoop Dogg, singers Lewis Capaldi and Shawn Mendes, actresses Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, among others. Production house Lekh-Haq had also listed one of its short films, ‘For Those That Watch Me Dream’, as an NFT on OpenSea.

Recently, Mumbai-based crypto startup WazirX also rolled out an NFT marketplace for over 300 creators hailing from diverse categories — 3D artists, digital artists, muralist photographers, canvas artists, street artists and visual artists. Still in the beta-phase, the WazirX NFT marketplace will see the participation of well-known names like visual artist Vimal Chandran, the anonymous street artist Tyler, mural artist Sneha Chakraborty, mixed media artist Ishita Banerjee from Montreal, automotive photographer Arjun Menon amongst many others.