Hallyu fans, K-pop idol NFTs spur crypto craze

Korean popular culture or K-pop artists drive the fanatic craze for unique or non-fungible tokens (NFT), enriching the market with NFT digital art. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

Korean popular culture or K-pop artists drive the fanatic craze for unique or non-fungible tokens (NFT), enriching the market with NFT digital art. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

FEATURED the go-to platform for unique or non-fungible tokens (NFTs), powered by cryptocurrency exchange Binance announces a new collaboration that will excite global fans of Hallyu, the Korean pop wave or K-pop. Forward-looking Korean brands from various industries can now capitalize on the NFT digital artform craze and market these crypto collectibles, featuring K-pop artists and creators from varied genres. Talk about daebak (wow, making a hit)!

How Hallyu idols can wow

Hallyu is the wave of Korean aesthetics exported on a massive scale, impacting global pop culture and economies. Hallyu idols hold a soft power, a desirable image that drives consumption of K-pop movies, music, games and even cuisine.

Imagine, if Shawn Mendes, Tove Lo and other Western artists such as Tycho can fundraise $200,000 with their NFT releases, as announced in this year’s April issue of Variety magazine, Hallyu idols can certainly daebak with their own non-fungible token art.

To put things further into perspective compared to the West, music magazine NME reported that rapper par excellence Eminem made $1.78 million from his first NFT drop, “Shady Con,” last April 2021. Rolling Stone magazine headlined how legendary DJ Steve Aoki sent the cash register ringing to the cool tune of $4.25 million for his first NFT crypto collection.

A Forbes magazine feature story on June 25, 2021, underscored how Mendes, Eminem and Aoki were “empowering themselves with a new stream of revenue to supplement income lost to paused live performances.” To the tune of millions, it wouldn’t seem like North American or South Korean idols had lost much income then.

Now, given the Twitter data from September 2019 to 2020 alone, consider that there were 6.1 billion tweets about K-pop from approximately 20 markets spread throughout the globe. That’s a lot of cash registers to daebak.

K-pop idol NFTs

An NFT is a singular digital marker, encoded into blockchain or electronic data storage that can be simultaneously accessed and shared in a decentralized system; thus, it cannot be duplicated, replaced or broken down. K-pop oppas and unnies (male and female idols, respectively) use NFTs to create exclusive digital content that holds high currency for fans and collectors. Unlike regular cryptocurrencies, which are assets in blockchain that are fungible or can be substituted for one another, K-pop idol non-fungible tokens are one-of-a-kind currencies in themselves.

Rare NFTs by in-demand brands and artists are available for marketing, trading and purchasing on Featured by Binance, a completely noncustodial platform. This digital marketplace even provides Hallyu idols themselves with an easier way to digitally encode or mint NFTs into the blockchain in order to produce creative content that meets their fans’ demands.

Spotlight on Featured by Binance

Established in 2017, Binance numbers among the world’s leading blockchain ecosystems and cryptocurrency infrastructure providers with a financial product suite that includes one of the largest digital asset exchanges.

It runs its own proprietary blockchain ecosystem, called Binance Smart Chain (BSC), which is decentralized, community driven and censorship resistant by design. BSC showcases a multitude of decentralized finance projects that are built on its blockchain. BSC also offers smart contracts that facilitate transactions across the ecosystem community and that bolster the multipurpose smart chain. One of the platforms on BSC, Featured by Binance, allows the minting of NFTs that are essentially creator controlled and censorship free.

Featured by Binance shifts the spotlight to the launch of NFT partners with powerful and iconic narratives, especially that of Hallyu creators and other Korean brands. Featured is an intuitive tool for creators to mint, showcase and sell as well as a thriving marketplace for brands to acquire, trade and profit from NFT creations.

K-pop NFTs as cultural producers

The worldwide success of K-pop would not have been possible without the immense adoration and dedication derived from its fans. Aside from patronizing music shows and purchasing official merchandise of their favorite oppas and unnies, fanatics have taken K-pop to the next level by being cultural producers themselves, creating dedicated fan sites, producing premium fan merchandise and even coming up with indelible fan chants, all in support of their Hallyu idols.

K-pop non-fungible tokens are unduplicable, crypto collectibles that enable fans and idols to create all that and much more. For instance, if fans invest in “The Show FanBox NFT Collection” by KStarLive, a higher-priced non-fungible token, they get access to the live performances of The Show, a Korean television program all about K-pop.

This exclusive crypto collection will sell like K-pop pancakes on Featured by Binance from November 23 onwards.

The Featured by Binance platform allows K-pop artist-creators to mint their original NFTs that cannot be modified once created. Collectors that own these digital assets would, therefore, gain an immutable and satisfying sense of exclusivity, which is key to the art and collectible fanbase. Direct, peer-to-peer transactions between artist-creators and fans through smart contracts also ensure platform security, doing away with intermediaries of trust.

Via the universally accessible public infrastructure of Featured by Binance, ultimate Hallyu netizens are able to appreciate truly singular K-pop NFTs of their fave oppas and unnies.