On a company call last Wednesday, Salesforce told employees that it plans to launch a non-fungible token (NFT) cloud service to make creating, designing, and exporting NFTs easier for artists. Both Salesforce Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor talked about the initiative.
The information came from a source of CNBC, who chose not to be named because the event was private. Salesforce, which has a cloud service already for sales representatives, marketing departments, and vendors, wants to make it easier for artists to create NFTs and publish them on NFT marketplaces like OpenSea.
The news comes just as OpenSea’s valuation increased by billions and NFT sales surpassed $25 billion in 2021, a number significantly higher than the total sales for NFTs in 2021.
Salesforce also mentioned that a possible avenue for the company would be to create its own NFT marketplace and remove the OpenSeas of the world from the arrangement. That way, NFT creators would have a one-stop shop for creating, designing, and selling their non-fungible tokens.
The stock price for Salesforce rose 1.5% Wednesday by the close of trading.
Marketing Companies Interested in Non-Fungible Tokens
Salesforce, whose main product details with customer relationship management, has noted in the past that marketers are becoming more interested in non-fungible tokens as the novelty in the industry is wearing off.
In a blog post covering 2022 predictions, Salesforce director of market strategy Mathew Sweezey wrote that “pioneering brands” will search for utility in non-fungible tokens and that the technology will become a lot more pervasive. He also says there will be clear “winners and losers” in 2022 in the NFT landscape as more companies look for utility in the tokens.
How companies might search for utility in NFTs — and use the Salesforce software to produce them — is still unknown, but there are clues in the landscape. Some companies might consider:
- Using NFTs as a form of a loyalty card to reward members with airdrops and discounts
- Employing NFTs in marketing campaigns to increase brand awareness
- Leverage NFTs to form partnerships in the field with prominent Web 3.0 companies
Today, Chinese cloud-computing company Xunlei announced that it had launched an NFT marketplace primarily designed for enterprises to connect with customers. There is a possibility that the world of NFT marketplaces will fragment further and that some niche marketplaces might spring up where people go for a specific purpose rather than just trading or collecting.