Visa Creator Program Educates Artists on NFT Market

Visa has unveiled the Visa Creator Program, a new offering that will help digital artists, musicians, fashion designers and filmmakers build up their enterprises through non-fungible tokens (NFTs), according to a Wednesday (March 30) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

There are 50 million artists, musicians and creators who publish content as a full- or part-time source of income. The creator economy has an estimated market size of more than $100 billion, the release stated.

Each cycle of the Visa Creator Program will support a segment of entrepreneurs looking to deepen their understanding of NFTs and the technology and platforms behind them.

“NFTs have the potential to become a powerful accelerator for the creator economy,” said Visa Head of Crypto Cuy Sheffield in the release. “We’ve been studying the NFT ecosystem and its potential impacts on the future of commerce, retail and social media. Through the Visa Creator Program, we want to help this new breed of small and micro businesses tap into new mediums for digital commerce.”

The Visa Creator Program is geared toward entrepreneurs in the art, music, fashion and film industries who want to incorporate NFTs into their business model.

It was reported last week that one in three NFT collections “essentially expired” without much trading activity. Another third of 8,400 NFT collections featuring 19.3 million NFTs have been trading below the amount it costs issuers to mint the tokens.

Read more: 1 in 3 NFT Collections Fail, Blockchain Analysis Shows

The failed projects have been mounting, and long-time crypto observers have been reminiscing about the bust of initial coin offerings (ICOs) from 2018. At that time, thousands of digital tokens quickly lost value after regulators warned they were probably unregulated securities.

NFT sales have been ebbing recently, with the 30-day sales volume down 40% from the previous month. OpenSea, an NFT marketplace, has seen its trading volume down by 67% in the past month.