Controversial YouTube celebrity Logan Paul has jumped on the nonfungible token, or NFT, bandwagon as part of his latest self-promotion.
Decentralized e-commerce platform Bondly announced Feb. 4 that it will create a limited edition of 44 NFTs featuring a "holographic" image of Paul in his boxing gear mocked up as a Pokemon card.
The NFTs will be distributed to auction winners in Paul’s upcoming Pokemon Box Break.
The YouTuber recently acquired six unopened boxes of first edition Pokemon cards from over twenty years ago, dropping a cool $2 million on the cards in the process.
Each box contains 36 packs of cards, and Paul is auctioning the packs from one of the boxes between Feb. 4 and Feb. 11 through the Goldin Auctions sports collectibles platform.
Paul will unbox and open the packs on behalf of the auction winners in a live stream on Pokemon Day, Feb. 27, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the game’s launch.
As a special bonus, each pack winner will also receive one of the limited edition NFTs featuring Paul as a Pokemon. The card describes Poke-Paul as a "legendary human", who is “tall and thick,” and one of the cards special attacks is a dynamic punch leaving opponents "confused."
The minimum bid price on each pack of cards is $10,000, and of the 24 packs of cards remaining on the auction site, only seven have been bid upon to this amount at the time of writing.
Perhaps appreciating that $10,000 represents a somewhat high level of entry, Bondly will also be issuing a whole line of Logan Paul NFTs “for those who are unable to make a bid in the auction.”
These will be sold individually through a custom Logan Paul store on the platform.
Although initially gaining recognition through his video content, Paul has also successfully transitioned into the boxing world. He was scheduled to fight Floyd Mayweather in an exhibition match on Feb. 20, although the match was indefinitely postponed earlier this week.
Mayweather was famously paid to promote an initial coin offering in 2017, which later turned out to be a scam.