Whaleshark, mysterious collector of 400,000 NFTs, sees Hong Kong as a hub for the digital tokens that are gaining fans
- 2021 NFT boom came ‘faster and harder than anybody could have imagined’, says collector WhaleShark, who started investing in NFTs in 2019
- He expects Hong Kong to become a major hub for NFTs, with big potential beyond digital avatars and portraits
WhaleShark, one of the most mysterious and active non-fungible token (NFT) collectors in the world with a portfolio of more than 400,000 items, sees Hong Kong as a hub for the blockchain-enabled digital asset when it comes to both money and art.
In an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post, WhaleShark, a British-born Chinese man who uses the pseudonym to maintain anonymity, said Hong Kong “is going to become a hub for NFTs, not only given their financial use case, but also for digital art as a whole” and that the future application of NFTs will go beyond portraits.
NFTs refer to units of data stored on a blockchain, which guarantees each digital asset to be unique and immutable. As such, NFTs can be owned and traded much like physical items in the real world.
WhaleShark spent most of his career in the brand consulting industry. He bought his first NFT in 2019 and said he was prepared to hold it for up to two decades until the world had woken up to their potential – the ability to bake in proof of uniqueness and authenticity.
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Early NFT projects back then, such as the game Cryptokitties, were largely seen as a passing fad among the cryptocurrency community.