New York Stock Exchange creates NFT for Spotify, Doordash and Co.


The New York Stock Exchange is jumping on the NFT hype and immortalizing IPOs using blockchain technology.

Now that the art market is increasingly opening up to non-fungible tokens (NFT), digital collectibles are now finding their way onto the traditional trading floor. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) has packed the first trades of a total of six companies in token form and immortalized them as GIFs. The NYSE announced on April 12th. The NYSE wants to celebrate the listings of Spotify, DoorDash, Unity, Roblox and Coupang.

NYSE immortalizes IPOs as a GIF

What exactly is being “tokenized” here, NYSE President Stacey Cunningham has in an accompanying LinkedIn post explained:

“When a company’s market maker first opens its shares to trade, its CEO rings the NYSE’s first-trade bell, heralding the company’s official arrival in the public markets.”

But the moment the bell rang is not recorded, but what is going on under the hood of the NYSE:

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Meanwhile, behind the scenes, NYSE technology processes over 350 billion order, price and trade news about our markets on our busiest days […]. Every message is recorded in the digital ledger of our trading platform. Only one of these messages marks the NYSE First Trade: the exact time at which a company went public and thus created the opportunity to let others participate in its success

In the meantime, you can see what the whole thing looks like on the CeFi portal Crypto.com. There, the NFT or GIFs are each presented as a one-off.

Spotify First Trade NFT. Source: Crypto.com

Apparently, the concept was inspired by the NFT collection NBA Top Shot by the crypto-kitties inventor DapperLabs. Here, too, it is about immortalizing special moments as NFT in GIF form and thus creating authenticity in the digital world. Similar to analog trading cards, users can buy the NFT “by packet” and hope for a particularly rare copy that could achieve a high price on the integrated NFT marketplace. DapperLabs relies on its specially developed Blockchain Flow, which is examined in more detail in the current issue of Kryptokompass.

Just look, don’t touch: “First Trade NFT” is not for sale yet

The NYSE’s First Trade NFTs are not up for sale – at least so far. President Cunningham has announced that further NFTs are planned for newcomers to the stock exchange. It will be a while before the NYSE NFT starts outside of marketing campaigns. However, the fact that NFTs are here to stay is a realization that increasingly seems to be catching on with traditional investors as well.