GaryVee and The versatile technology of NFT

With every passing day, people find new original and innovative applications for the versatile technology that are NFTs. If giving a new meaning to digital asset ownership and pretty much revolutionizing the way we think about digital trust and digital property weren’t enough, it is now clear that they’ll be revolutionizing the way we think about real world property too.

Of course, we should have seen this coming already. While nowadays cryptocurrencies are mostly seen as a speculative asset and blockchain as a security technology, it’s important to remember that crypto coins were made to work as actual currency, and the blockchain is a framework to establish trust between parties. GaryVee is just taking us forward in that direction.

Let’s see how this works.

Who is GaryVee?

If you’ve been following Gary Vaynerchuk (better known as GaryVee), you’d have seen this coming too. GaryVee is an American entrepreneur that has been a part of many different endeavors in his life.

In 1998, right after college, he was given control of his family’s wine business, then called Shopper’s Discount Liquors, and basically gave it a different direction using contemporary marketing techniques. He gave it a more modern name, “Wine Library”, created an online store for it, and later on even started a YouTube channel to talk about wine, called “Wine Library TV”.

It was clear that entrepreneurship and marketing were his thing, and he knew that too. So in 2011 he stepped away from Wine Library and started to focus on his own company, VaynerMedia, a marketing company focused on digital marketing. And this was followed by VaynerX, a communications company, Gallery Media Group, a media company, among many others.

In his words, he is a serial entrepreneur. Very fitting.

GaryVee and NFTs

GaryVee is very good at noticing which trends are going to explode and which aren’t. He got into digital marketing before Web 2.0 had fully launched and the internet wasn’t such a part of our lives as it is now, and even pioneered the use of YouTube as a marketing platform, being incredibly successful with it, even though talking about wine is a bit of a niche subject.

So, it wasn’t very surprising that he’d end up deep into the blockchain community as this technology started to explode. When he heard about NFTs, he knew that the only way to figure out its full potential was to get into the NFT community by making his own collection. That’s how VeeFriends was born.

VeeFriends is a collection of 10,255 original tokens, created from 268 original artworks made by GaryVee himself, which depict human traits that he admires in the form of animals. Upon buying a VeeFriend token, you become part of the VeeFriend community, and gain access to many benefits along with it that are valid until 4 May 2024.

VeeCon

One of the perks of being a VeeFriend is access to VeeCon, a conference created and hosted by GaryVee, which is to be held in Minneapolis, and planned to be held yearly until 2024, being focused on the many facets of entrepreneurship: business, marketing, ideas, innovation, competition, among others, in the form of multiple talks, panels, discussions, and collaborations.

However, VeeCon tickets aren’t being publicly sold. Having a VeeFriends NFT is the ticket. If you want to go to VeeCon, you first have to buy a VeeFriends token from its website or from someone that already has it.

And this is a great idea. VeeFriends is GaryVee’s own community, so he’s making a conference for his community, for people who already follow him or are interested in what he has to say. Which is what VeeCon is all about. And NFTs are a great way to verify if someone is part of the community or not: the person connects their wallet, and then you check whether they have a VeeFriend or not. And with the way NFTs work, this can’t be falsified.

This kind of innovative way to sell tickets is bound to become more common this way. And with Gary’s dive into NFTs and blockchain technology, we can also expect some more innovative enterprises from him in the near future.