Chicago Bulls team up with Shopify to launch NFT series

The NBA’s Chicago Bulls have launched NFTs depicting six championship wins from the 1990s via leading e-commerce platform Shopify.

Shopify is a multinational firm that provides website-based storefronts and payments infrastructure. Shopify president, Harley Finklestein, announced the NFT drop on Twitter earlier today.

If you’ve spent 1 minute on the internet this year, you’ve seen a lot about NFTs. @Shopify we are making it easier for our merchants to sell NFTs directly through their stores, with one of the first being the @ChicagoBulls NFT store. https://t.co/Qv2wKO7RCS

— Harley Finkelstein (@harleyf) July 26, 2021

According to Finklestein, the Chicago Bulls franchise is one Shopify’s first partners to launch an NFT storefront on the platform, with Shopify’s president noting the service will only be available to a “select few” in its formative stages.

Shopify integrated Sweet’s NFT marketplace in May, allowing its customers to issue and sell nonfungible tokens directly through the popular e-commerce interface. Sweet supports NFTs issued via Ethereum’s ERC-721 standard, Simple Ledger Protocol’s SLP token standard, and Dapper Labs’ Flow blockchain.

The Chicago Bulls’ NFTs were minted on Flow, which also hosts the officially licensed NBA Topshot tokenized highlight collectibles.

The “Bulls Legacy Collection” will be released over six drops, with each token celebrating the team’s six iconic championship wins between 1991 and 1998. The first NFT was launched on July 26 and has already sold out, with the second token slated for launch later today. The remaining four NFTs scheduled for launch over the next four days.

Related: The future of art? World-famous artists delve into NFTs

Despite the NFT sector recently cooling off, NFT sales surpassed $2.5 billion for the first half of 2021.

On July 21, Cointelegraph reported that popular NFT marketplace, OpenSea, had closed a $100 million Series B funding round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation of $1.5 billion — indicating VC investors remain bullish on the nonfungible sector.

Retail investors still appear eager to get their hands on prized NFTs too, with Tyson Fury’s first NFT launch seeing a single token fetch almost $1 million in a July 16 auction, while more than 32,000 people signed up to participate in contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s latest NFT drop last week.