Endangered Tigers NFT aims to help big cats by donating to charity, a trend one founder hopes catches on in Asia
- The Endangered Tigers is a collection of 5,888 cartoon tigers that will donate 25 per cent of proceeds to charity and the 13-year-old artist’s college fund
- Co-founder Usman Qureshi said the team wants to create the ‘charity of the metaverse’, using NFTs to contribute to good causes
A Hong Kong non-fungible token (NFT) project is trying to stand out among a flurry of NFT projects featuring cartoon tigers by using the digital collectibles to support charity.
The Endangered Tigers is an NFT collection of 5,888 cartoon tigers that will be minted on the Solana blockchain. The team, consisting of four people in their early 20s and a 13-year-old artist, says they want to use the project to help wildlife and contribute to other social causes, according to Usman Qureshi, one of the team members. For now, though, only 12.5 per cent of proceeds will go to charity and another 12.5 per cent to the artist’s college fund.
“From 2022 onwards, this is something that charities, non-profits and NGOs should definitely adapt into, because people love holding a specific asset, whether physical or virtual, to show off the fact that they have supported this particular cause,” Qureshi said in an interview with the South China Morning Post.
Sales of the collection started on Saturday. If the entire collection sells out at 0.88 SOL, the cryptocurrency on the Solana blockchain, that would value it at HK$4.1 million (US$527,000) based on current value, resulting in HK$513,000 for charity. The team will vote on which organisation will get the donation at a later date, Qureshi said.
In Hong Kong, a project named CryptoTigers, which consists of 888 algorithmically generated pixelated tiger avatars, is entering the market based upon works created by an 11-year-old artist. Fortune Tigers is offering 10,000 Lunar New Year-themed virtual felines. Typical Tigers, launched last year, said it has donated US$10,000 in ether to Big Cat Rescue, a non-government organisation, to help rescue tigers in a Thailand zoo.
NFTs, data stored on a blockchain that guarantees it is unique and immutable, took the world by storm last year. People are spending millions on cartoon profile pictures to join exclusive communities, with some individual NFT artworks going for tens of millions of dollars.
The Endangered Tigers developers want to use this trend to help big cats in the real world.