Pizza Hut Canada Just Released Its Own NFTs

Pizza Hut Canada just announced that it too would chase the sudden boom non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have experienced by selling digital versions of their pizza. But before talking about Pizza Hut's latest offering, let's clarify what it is that they are actually selling.

If you have heard of NFTs previously, it is likely because Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first-ever tweet as an NFT back in early March. At the time of Rolling Stone's reporting, digital ownership of Dorsey's tweet, which is autographed and verified, reached $2.5 million in bids. Since then, digital art, like a purely digital collage made by the artist Beeple, sold for $69 million, according to BBC. The BBC piece goes further to explain that NFTs are like bitcoin except that, where bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies work because they are interchangeable, NFTs have a unique identity. In other words, NFTs are like "a rare trading card."

So, when NFTs are sold, what's actually up for sale is a specific strain of code that authenticates ownership of each digital artwork. Jake Bruckman defined the appeal to NPR, saying: "These are the property rights to digital content." And anything can count as digital content requiring property rights — from tweets, to cat GIFs, to pizza recipes. Having smelled an easy buck and a way to get themselves into the news, Pizza Hut has decided to auction some digital pizza slices for a limited time.

In their press release, Pizza Hut declared that starting on March 16, every day at lunchtime, they would release one 8-bit-style version of Pizza Hut favorite recipes for auction. In other words, they're selling digital pictures of pizza. The digital-only pizza collection is called "1 Byte Favorites." It's a pun they spelled out by highlighting the fact that 8 bits equals one byte. 

"It's a fun way to deliver our Favourites on an emerging platform where people can truly appreciate the perfect pan pizza forever," Daniel Meynen, Pizza Hut Canada's chief marketing officer, raved.

The initial asking price for each recipe is $0.0001 ETH, a cryptocurrency called Ethereum. Eater converted the price into American dollars as 18 cents and reported that the first pizza recipe auctioned was sold for $8,824. Eater also noted that by playing into the cryptocurrency craze, Pizza Hut is leaving behind its recent adoption of more environmentally-friendly practices (via TechWire). That's because "some artists have already used the equivalent of an EU resident's energy consumption in an entire lifetime in NFT transactions," Eater explained. 

But if you happen to be interested in spending thousands of dollars on a slice of pizza that you can't touch and others can use, keep an eye on Pizza Hut's page on Rarible. If not, Pizza Hut has also embarked on a Newstalgia campaign with a special Pac-Man Promotion that could win you an arcade cabinet.