Last week, NFTs of Syed Saddiq’s face were put up for grabs on NFT marketplace OpenSea. He’s selling them for charity, in hopes of raising funds for flood relief efforts, and more, down the road.
More recently, another high-profile Malaysian whose name is synonymous with AirAsia has hopped onto the NFT train. Newsflash: Tony Fernandes was gifted an NFT from Jay Chou’s collection called PhantaBear, and it was bought by his gifter for 1 ETH (about RM14,000 at the time of writing).
“My first NFT gift. Thank you man from South Asia. Watch airasia on Internet 3.0,” wrote Tony Fernandes in an Instagram post breaking the news.
Over on OpenSea, we’re able to see the transactions that took place for Tony to become the owner of PHANTA BEAR #1281.
Looking at the transaction details of PHANTA BEAR #1281, you can see that the user “AC8C10” bought the NFT from someone named “tantan_” and transferred the ownership to “EB2DA4”. EB2DA4 is presumably Toney Fernandes, based on his Instagram post claiming ownership of the NFT.
Going into the AC8C10 profile, you’ll notice that they own the “bigpayme.eth” Ethereum Name Service (ENS). But it would be a stretch at this point in time to immediately assume that AC8C10 is affiliated with BigPay in any way.
Dictionary Time: ENS is an Ethereum-based project that allows users to display long Ethereum public addresses in a simplified text-based way. This makes it easier to share, use, and remember addresses and other data.
That is, unless BigPay itself uses this domain in the future, or if there are future transactions from this account that points us to BigPay or AirAsia.
However, Tony’s Instagram caption for his NFT post does have our curiosity piqued. “Watch airasia on Internet 3.0″—could we assume that he’s teasing or hinting at a possibility that AirAsia will enter the NFT space? Only time will tell, we suppose.
If it does, then off the top of our heads, some possible ways the brand could utilise NFTs would be through releasing merchandise bundled with NFTs, or even coming up with AllStar avatars for the metaverse.
We know that the brand isn’t averse to trying out new things, with some examples being the launch of its virtual idol in 2021 and its AI chatbot AVA back in 2019.
But for now, all we can say with confidence is that Tony is affiliated with the wallet, “0xeb2da416dee2b7fa45c9723a1c66478d47a3fe3b”, and we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on any future transactions it’s involved in.
- Read more NFT related articles here.
Featured Image Credit: Tony Fernandes
