Budweiser, a subsidiary of Anheuser-Busch InBev, has jumped on the NFT train with the purchase of the “beer.eth” Ethereum domain name along with a piece of a non-fungible token (NFT) art.
According to records from NFT marketplace OpenSea, the beer maker bought a Budweiser-branded Rocketship NFT for 8 Ether (roughly $25,704). It is an NFT bottle rocket from the Tom Sachs Rocket Factory Collection. The company used the “Life of the Party” image, featuring three beer cans making up the body of a Rocketship, for its official Twitter profile picture.
Acknowledging the NFT’s creator, Tom Sachs, Budweiser seems to be taking another step into the crypto and blockchain space with this latest purchase. On August 11, the company also bought the domain name “Beer.eth” through Ethereum Name Service (ENS) on OpenSea for 30 ETH. Taking the price of Ether as of the time of this writing at $3,100 brings the dollar value to $93,000.
For clarity, the ENS is a new naming protocol that is more or less the blockchain equivalent of the commonly used Domain Name System (DNS). It allows users to register custom websites or wallet names on the Ethereum network. And just like regular domain names that can be bought and sold on the internet, ENS domains can be purchased or sold as NFTs.
Apart from the “beer.eth” domain, it appears Budweiser also purchased the “beyondbeer.eth” ENS domain.
What you should know
Budweiser’s latest venture into the NFT space comes just after Visa, the credit card and payment processing giant made a substantial investment into the nonfungible token (NFT) space with a $150,000 acquisition of a CryptoPunk, the collective of digital artworks that pioneered the mainstream culture of the space back in 2017.
OpenSea in the last month has its transaction volume exceeded $2 billion, according to Dapp Radar. Opensea is also the first and only NFT platform to have over $1 billion in transaction volume and it accounts for the most burns on the Ethereum blockchain, amounting to 14,000 ETH ($43.4 million) as of the time of this writing.
