DC's Batman will be receiving brand-new NFTs, the company announced on Wednesday. The Caped Crusader's parent company is partnering up with Palm NFT Studio to deliver various NFTs in the form of Batman's cowl. The NFT market is booming, and DC is the latest company to use NFTs of their famous superhero characters.
NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens have recently experienced a veritable explosion in popularity in 2021. Utilizing the blockchain method of storage and data tracking, an NFT can be any digital file, but most sold today are forms of digital art. NFTs are wholly unique and can be owned, bought and sold by users (often going for very high prices). Marvel, for their part, has already ventured into the world of NFTs via VeVe Digital Collectibles; their collection includes digital collectible statutes of Captain America as well as multiple digital comics, including Amazing Spider-Man #1.
Via DCcomics.com, the company announced their partnership with Palm NFT Studio (and the latter announced the same on their Twitter.com account). The "Bat Cowl Collection" will launch over 200,000 unique 3D-rendered Batman cowls on the NFT marketplace beginning on April 26th, 2022. Publisher and CCO of DC Comics Jim Lee stated that Batman is an ideal candidate for NFTs because "...his appearance has changed and shifted over the past 83 years...what’s exciting about this amazing collaboration is that we are continuing the evolution of his distinctive Bat Cowl by bringing it into the modern digital world, making it accessible and more wildly engaging than ever before."
But the announcement stresses that the Bat Cowl Collection is more than a simple collectible item. The NFTs will allow access to a private DC universe fan forum that includes behind-the-scenes content, events for DC fans, and other merchandise. In addition, DC plans to integrate the Bat Cowl Collection into future stories from DC Comics. It is not entirely known exactly how ownership of an NFT will allow this, but the press release does mention metaverse integration, so perhaps the two will be intertwined in the future.
Harsh criticism has been levied against the use and expansion of NFTs by major companies in recent months. This is owed to the way that NFTs work (as digital items, they can be copied) and the environmental cost it takes to create a NFT (they require tremendous amounts of computing power). Nevertheless, DC is moving forward with their NFT integration into comics, films and beyond, and Batman's enduring popularity means the Dark Knight is an ideal superhero to begin DC's move into the world of NFTs.
Source: DCcomics.com
