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The NFT craze seems to have made its way into the Kenyan space with world-renowned athlete Eliud Kipchoge among the local pioneers. Kipchoge, who is regarded as the greatest marathon runner of all time chose to invest in this Ethereum blockchain-based tech by launching a library of images as Non-Fungible Tokens.
The NFT collection includes digital representations of some of the greatest moments of his career signed by Eliud himself. This obviously includes the famous record-breaking run he took in Vienna Austria for less than two hours.
The bidding for Kipchoge’s NFTs was placed on Open Sea auction platform, a peer-to-peer marketplace for rare digital items and crypto collectables.
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“In my career, I’ve been always interested in innovation and therefore it fits me well to present my special sports memories on the blockchain,” Kipchoge says, ” I trust it’ll help someone around the world to get these positive memories as it does to me,” Eliud stated during the launch of his NFTs.
I can say that I am really grateful to have the highlights of my career now available as NFT. I hope it will give someone around the world the same positive memories as it does to me. Please visit https://t.co/2c9YO7esK6 to find all information. pic.twitter.com/icFerGNzTm
— Eliud Kipchoge – EGH?? (@EliudKipchoge) April 3, 2021
The NFTs are also backed by Momentible.io, a site that is designed to store NFT collectables of legendary moments. This is so as to give famous personalities the opportunity to immortalise those milestones as Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs).
This is easily possible considering how secure NFTs are known to be. This is because every single blockchain-based image is given a unique serial number with guaranteed scarcity and protected ownership guaranteed by the blockchain.
The auction for Kipchoge’s images is set to run till April 8th at 11 11 pm Kenyan time (2200hrs CEST). The winner will also receive the artwork in high quality and a personal video message from Eliud to congratulate the new owner.
A number of digital artists and famous celebrities have been lucky enough to collect millions of dollars for NFTs that they put up for auction. This includes Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey who sold an NFT of his first-ever tweet for $2.9 million (about KES 300 million). The tech mogul wen to convert the money to bitcoin and donate it to charity.
So, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Kipchoge’s auction become quite competitive and close at a really high price. The highest bid for one of the NFTs at the time of writing this article was $2,109 (about KES 229,400) and rising.
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