Is NFT the next big thing for high-end whisky collectors?
The two entrepreneurs who sold the 1991 McAllen barrel for $2.3 million earlier this month certainly thought so.
The double-sized barrel, the first-to-fill sherry barrel distilled by The Macallan, currently holds around 600 bottles of whiskey from 30 years old and is sold at auction. It includes a digital asset by artist Trevor Jones called "Angel's Share," an uncompressed scan of Jones' paintings, along with animated components.
The sale is a partnership between Origin Protocol and Metacask (NFT Market for Whisky Barrels). Origin has been involved in the $11.7 million sale of musician 3LAU and the $760,000 sale of Charlie Bit Me video, partnered with controversial YouTube star Jake Paul, and recently hired Paris Hilton as a strategic investor.
Nim Siriwardana, co-founder of Metacask, said the basic principles of NFT barrel auctions are similar to traditional barrel auctions. Private buyers trade barrels that are stored on the distillery site or other places on bonds, and then, depending on how the liquid ages, retains it for decades as the value of the actual wine in the barrel appreciates (although, given the angel's share, as the years go by, there will be less and less liquid and fewer potential bottles). Bottling is done by collectors, and these bottles are kept or gifted, or sold at traditional auction houses like Sotheby's.
Siriwardana said: "The owner has gone to Bonhams and valued it until we can go ahead and say let's do this NFT. "When you bought this NFT, you were now the owner of the barrel." This is slightly different from the concept you find in art, where the asset itself is usually an NFT. Here, the NFT is also the contract where you own the barrel. ”
Earlier this year, Bonhams evaluated barrels without artwork, worth between $1.1 and $1.2 million, Siriwardana said. Metacask began bidding for the barrel with $1.75 million in digital artwork.
Matthew Liu, co-founder of origin protocol, sees some of the different benefits of NFTs for high-end consumer goods such as whisky kegs, as well as high-end handbags or watches.
The first is to be able to show off your purchases to the world – for those who like this sort of thing.
"You own this precious possession of rare whisky, and now you can show off on many NFT platforms, such as Origin, OpenSea, blogging or social media. There is also an extra social element. The industry hasn't really embraced technology in the past, and it could spark more interest in high-priced options," Liu said. "When you buy something in the material world, you can only show it off to dozens of people, or put it in a museum or a gallery."
A less conspicuous application is validation. NFTs can prove the provenance of the original creator and track it in the blockchain every time they change hands.
In the current non-technical system, Siriwardana said, brokers track privately owned whiskey barrels and can falsify records and double-sell assets. Each barrel sold by NFT will have a unique reference number that includes information about how it changed hands, but may also include information such as when the distillery or expert tested the whiskey in the barrel.
"[The information] will be in the metadata of the NFT itself," Siriwardana said. "It's difficult to perform a double sell scam because it's easy for brokers to check this information to make sure they're not selling someone else's barrel."
William Grant and Sons recently sold 15 46-year-old bottles of Graffiti whisky for $18,000 per bottle, each with its own image of an NFT rotating bottle, as a certificate of security title — and a way to show off the purchase in society.
Will Peacock, head of luxury at William Grant and Sons, told Forbes contributor Bernard Marr that NFTs are a way to deepen consumer engagement and reach new collectors.
But Liu also believes that if brewers embrace the technology, NFTs could provide them with a potential source of income, through royalties every time NFTs change hands, or by allowing consumers to invest early in bottles they can't get or afford.
A spokesperson for The Macallan said Angels' Share NFT and Barrel is a standalone project that has nothing to do with Macallan. The whisky in this barrel will never be bottled as a McAllen single malt whisky.
There is one other asset related to the auction that has not yet been made public: Jones's physical painting.
Siriwardana laughs and says, "Trevor now has it in his studio and I've got it, depending on whether I can afford it or not. We'll see if buyers of NFTs are interested in buying physical objects. ”
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="24" >What is NFT? How do I create my own NFT work? </h1>
Because NFT has the characteristics of unique identification, the text, pictures and videos loaded with NFT are equivalent to having a unique identity in the digital world.
Artist friends directly search for "NFT China" to cast your own NFT works [illustration, photography, music, video, etc.]