Crypto Becoming Cultural, Cool, Says Top Visa Executive

Investing in cryptocurrencies was considered unsafe and a huge risk, but this no longer seems to be the case. In a recent statement, a top Visa executive said that NFTs were attracting a number of people into the crypto space, generating a "whole new class" of mainstream consumers.

While regulatory uncertainties still surround cryptocurrencies and NFTs, the investors are no more afraid of investing in blockchain-based assets. People who are interested in music, art, and photography are seeing more opportunities in the crypto industry due to NFTs, Visa's head of crypto Cuy Sheffield said.

NFTs are blockchain-based digital assets that act as collectors' items since they can't be duplicated and are rare by design, hence the name 'non-fungible token.' These digital tokens can be an image, a video or music producing a new concept of ownership in the entertainment industry as the details are stored on a blockchain or digital ledger.

Crypto assets interested only tech or finance geeks before the explosion of the NFT industry that is being witnessed now. Sheffield said at the Singapore Fintech Festival on Monday that "crypto is becoming cultural, it's becoming cool."

"It used to be that if you were investing in crypto, you were kind of weird," the Visa executive told CNBC. He also mentioned that crypto wallets are no longer the place to just store cryptocurrencies. They now provide means for people to find artwork, or music, becoming a "super app" and influencing many people's lives.

Companies like Visa and Mastercard have entered the space with crypto-linked payment cards for easy crypto-related payments, taking advantage of the current explosion in interest.

However, the popularity of meme tokens is also another reason why digital assets have become popular. Yusho Liu, the co-founder of Coinhako, a cryptocurrency exchange, claims that there's a "huge demand" for meme tokens like Dogecoin and Shiba Inu in Singapore as well.

Liu further said that there are many requests of people asking to list Shiba Inu on the exchange. A similar situation was seen in the case of the Robinhood crypto exchange wherein 500,000 people signed a petition on Change.org to list Shiba Inu on the platform.