FTX Partners With Dolphin Entertainment to Launch NFT Marketplace

A new non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace has been announced as a collaborative effort between FTX and Dolphin Entertainment. 

The team at FTX is teaming up with Dolphin Entertainment to craft a new NFT marketplace that focuses on sports and entertainment brands. While Dolphin will handle the creative side of things, FTX will be in charge of the crypto end of the business. According to Variety, the marketplace will be large-scale and consumer-facing.

The newly formed partnership will see Dolphin developing and executing the branding, production, and marketing of the platform. FTX, meanwhile, will be working behind the scenes to ensure the technical aspects of the marketplace are in good working order. The development of the platform along with what brands to target will be a joint effort. The types of brands the project is looking to snag are those revolving around sports, film & TV, music, video games & eSports, cooking, and lifestyle brands. 

CEO of Dolphin Entertainment, Bill O’Dowd, stated that “To be able to offer a seamless user experience, where the wallet and the product are all in one place; to allow the consumer to pay with crypto, credit card or traditional currency; to have the product available on wholly-owned and programmed online destinations; to have the same product available for purchase directly in-app; and to also have actual customer support, when necessary, are enormous differentiating factors that FTX provides.”  O’Dowd goes on to say that with the two companies working together, the platform will immediately be on a level playing field with competitors that have already been operating. 

Brett Harrison, President of FTXUS, added that the pairing makes and will help FTXUS access content and IPs that would have been otherwise hard to nail down. Some of those IPs Dolphin already owns including The Door, a celebrity chef platform, and Shore Fire Media, a music PR firm. 

NFTs sales continue to soar

The NFT craze is looking less like a trend and is something that is here to stay with multiple reports daily on new collections of platforms. While most casual crypto fans are familiar with Beeple’s $69.3 million NFT sale earlier in the year, the truth is that there have been around a dozen NFT art sales alone to eclipse the $1 million mark. 

Last week, a pair of NFTs from the CryptoPunk collection sold for well north of $1 million. One for $5.45 million and the other for $3.76 million. The latter NFT was reportedly purchased by famous entrepreneur and social media influencer, Gary Vaynerchuk. 

In other major NFT news, Axie Infinity became the most popular NFT marketplace in terms of volume, crossing the $571 million mark in the last month. Additionally, around $27 million in volume was seen over a 24-hour period last week, while OpenSea managed around $9 million. According to DappRadar, a third of the fifteen highest-selling NFTs in July were Axies.