Taiwan puppeteers look to NFT’s

Taiwan puppeteers look to NFT’s Taiwan A group of Taiwanese puppeteers are looking to use non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, to help bring their traditional art form into the modern era and keep it relevant for a new audience. NFTs are crypto assets representing a digital item such as an image, video, or even land in virtual worlds, with prices of some rising so fast last year that speculators around the world sometimes "flipped" them within days for a profit. Pili International Multimedia (8450.TWO), which makes Taiwan's longest-running television show featuring the puppets at its studio in central Taiwan's Yunlin County, says it wants to use NFTs as another source of revenue. Pili has thousands of glove puppet characters, a traditional part of Taiwanese street entertainment culture spinning colourful and highly stylised stories of heroic courage and romance, often with martial arts. The puppets are painstakingly created, and expertly manoeuvred during the filming of the shows, with costumes that are sewn on and strands of hair meticulously put in place. Pili said four of their puppet characters were made into digital versions and 30,000 sets have been sold as NFTs. The company declined to reveal the profit-sharing with the market platform, Marketing technology company VeVe, which is in charge of selling the NFTs, said the stories of the puppet heroes resonates with a younger crowd and could draw in foreign fans of superhero films, such as those based on characters from Marvel Comics.