NFTs Are Going Big in Latin America Amid a Crypto Boom
Different companies and organizations are incorporating non-fungible tokens into users' daily lives, not speculating.
With an increasing number of financial and political crises in recent years, Latin American citizens have found in crypto a powerful tool to cope with the instability. Now, non-fungible tokens (NFT) are booming in the region, with the goal of solving real problems and not speculation.
High inflation has led millions of Latin Americans to seek refuge in cryptocurrencies, with stablecoins leading the way. According to Mastercard, 51% of consumers in the region have made at least one transaction with crypto. Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador are among the top 20 countries with the greatest crypto adoption, according to Chainalysis' 2022 Global Crypto Adoption Index.
NFTs have reached mainstream audiences in developed countries through projects including Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks, which have now become highly sought-after collectables. Latin American companies, by contrast, are investing in NFT use cases such as supporting local artists, allowing customers to resell airline tickets or donating to nonprofit organizations.
Enigma.art is a decentralized platform that mainly provides NFT’ development services for well-known traditional Latin American artists, ranging from fine arts to the music industry. It connects artists with their fans through NFTs’ meet-and-greet tickets, collectable cards or original songs.
“When we entered the crypto universe in 2021 and discovered what an NFT was, we wanted to buy an original piece by a Latin American artist – until we realized that there were practically none. So we created our own platform to link fans with artists through NFTs,” Facundo Migoya, Enigma.art CEO, told CoinDesk.
Facundo and Manuel Migoya — age 21 and 18 respectively — co-founded Enigma.art in 2021. It has more than 5,000 users and at least 1,500 wallets connected. The platform allows users to find and buy original songs from the artists, who receive a royalty percentage of the purchase, dissociate the voice from each of the different instruments and then mix them differently to create a new track.
After acquiring an NFTicket, a customer can auction, sell, transfer, gift or exchange them through a peer-to-peer system on TravelX, that the startup’s chief blockchain officer, Facundo Martin Diaz, told CoinDesk when it launched.
“Imagine if a big event is happening, customers could buy several tickets and then resell or auction them for double the price, the possibilities with NFTickets are endless,” Pastori added.
The NFTickets can currently be purchased with fiat money or USDC through a wallet created in TravelX or through BinancePay and more recently with Lemon, a Latin American crypto exchange. Both TravelX and Flybondi receive 2% commission on every transaction.