Disney launches web3 digital collectible market

After dismissing the vast majority of its metaverse team earlier this year, Disney is wading into the NFT space with a new digital collective program featuring Star Wars, Pixar and Princess pins - but purposefully avoiding the term “NFT.”

Disney is launching an app with Web3 startup Dapper Labs to let people collect digital pins, becoming the latest major brand to try an NFT-based program, without using the term “NFT.”

Disney and Dapper [recently] opened a waitlist to join the new mobile app called Disney Pinnacle, which digitizes pin collecting, a fan subculture that already is popular among Disney enthusiasts. The partnership represents another notch for Dapper Labs, a startup that basically kicked off the NFT craze in 2021 having teamed up with the NBA on Top Shot a year earlier; Dapper also works with the NFL on digital collectibles. For The Walt Disney Co., the new app signifies a step into Web3 technology, after the company shrank its metaverse ambitionsearlier this year.

With the app, Disney fans can buy pins that are digital versions of the types of pins that have become collectible items through sales at Disney parks. The digital pins are based on Disney’s original intellectual property, Pixar and Lucasfilms’ assets, but that does not include Marvel IP, according to Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs.

Collectors will be able to buy and trade pins with other collectors inside the app, and the experience is built on the mechanics of Web3, without overloading users with jargon and technology. For instance, the acronym NFT, which stands for non-fungible tokens, won’t appear anywhere in the product; instead, the pins are called “digital collectibles.” The collectibles will be minted on the Flow Blockchain, and users technically will need a Dapper Labs crypto wallet to store the pins, though that is all built into the app, Gharegozlou said. Prices for the pins were not disclosed.

Full story at AdAge.