Pringles Joins The NFT Cash Grab With CryptoCrisp Chips That You Can't Actually Eat

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By  Dennis Lee

The future is going to be a weird place. I recently learned about NFTs, aka Non-Fungible Tokens, when Rolling Stone announced that Kings of Leon would release their next album, When You See Yourself, as an NFT. If that last sentence read as complete gibberish to you, imagine how I felt typing it.

Fungible. That is not a word I thought I'd ever need to use, let alone learn, but here we go into the wacky world of cryptocurrency. As this handy CNN piece puts it, "In the simplest terms, NFTs transform digital works of art and other collectibles into one-of-a-kind, verifiable assets that are easy to trade on the blockchain." So, basically, it turns a digital work into a unique piece that's digitally certified and identifiable, and gives it value due to its rarity. (Our friends at Lifehacker have explained this much better than I can.)

This is where Pringles comes in. According to a press release, the company worked with a Ukrainian graphic artist, Vasya Kolotusha, to come up with a shiny golden image of a Pringles can that is "CryptoCrisp" flavored. There's no physical product, just a digital image, and Pringles is releasing 50 of them. You can place bids for one of the limited-edition images here. Currently, bidding stands at a US dollar amount of $179.91, or roughly 0.1 ETH (that's Ether, the currency of Ethereum, the most widely used blockchain). The starting price was $2, or 0.0013 ETH, which is the retail price of a Pringles can.

Maybe The Takeout should get in on this. If we put up a graphic of my bulbous head and somebody out there bought it, maybe you could fund a socially-distanced, work-from-home pizza party. That's it. That's how we'll all get rich.

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