Every day, another one bites the dust. Just this week: Serena Williams tersely announced her foray into the Bored Ape NFT craze, Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon awkwardly advertised their own monkeys on late-night TV, Liam Payne made a Twitter account just for NFT talk, and it was revealed that late grunge legend Kurt Cobain’s 55th birthday will be commemorated with the sale of meaningless digital receipts of Nirvana photographs. 2021 was already the year in which celebrities began to cash in on the NFT game, but more recently, it’s as if all of the famous people in the country gathered together in a gilded lair and hashed out a collective rollout strategy announcing each of their entrances into the crypto pseudo-art-collecting game.
The degree to which celebrities have recently flocked in droves to the crypto offshoot and the ways they’ve marketed their involvement is particularly telling; especially considering the vast coverage of how inane, precarious, and environmentally devastating NFTs are. “Crypto is here to stay,” Reese Witherspoon, perhaps the most vocal A-list star within the recent celebrity crypto craze, tweeted in December. “I’m committed to supporting creators who have pioneered the NFT space, and encouraging more women to be a part of the conversation.” This week, Tinashe also staked her interest in the space, in part due to her desire to bring women into the world of this purportedly exciting new frontier of tech.
