Credit Card Giant Visa is Recruiting Creators for a One-year NFT Program

As Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) gain more and more popularity, Visa announced that it is recruiting creators bent on selling their work and services using NFTs.

This week the global payments giant began accepting applications for a one-year immersive program aiming to help gig workers, entrepreneurs, and artists dive deeper into the commercial side of NFTs, short for non-fungible tokens.

“We want to build a small cohort of amazing talented creators from different geographies across the world that are focused on leveraging NFTs for different use cases,” Cuy Sheffield, head of digital assets with Visa, said to Yahoo Finance.

Visa’s new program, through a test partnership with Micah Johnson, a former professional baseball player turned notable NFT creator, will allow selected creators to draw on Visa’s technical knowledge of the NFT space as well as give them an undisclosed one-time stipend, exposure to other emerging NFT creators and multinational company’s partners and clients.

Sheffield says the company won’t receive any direct financial incentive but instead, can use the program as a way to learn how it can enhance NFT commerce and help their clients navigate the emerging technology.

“We have some of the largest merchants and brands across the world that are coming to Visa, and they’re asking about NFT’s and how they can participate and get involved in this space,” Sheffield explained. “And so we want to have this cohort that we can then connect to clients across our ecosystem to help enable really interesting collaborations.”

It was last August that Visa purchased a Crypto Punk NFT for roughly $150,000 worth of ETH at the time. The timing of the purchase coincided with the start of the market’s meteoric growth.
Investors spent $44 billion dollars on NFTs last year and already more than $23 billion in 2022, according to data from blockchain analysis firm, Chainalysis.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.