Macy's is launching NFTs of its iconic Thanksgiving Day parade balloons

• Macy's is launching its first-ever NFT series featuring its iconic Thanksgiving Day parade balloons.
• The retail giant will unveil a limited-edition collection of 9,510 NFTs to coincide with its 95th parade.
• The tokens are free for anyone to mint beginning the holiday.

Macy's is launching its first-ever NFT series featuring its iconic Thanksgiving Day parade balloons.

The retail giant will unveil a limited-edition collection of 9,510 non-fungible tokens to coincide with its 95th parade on November 25, Thanksgiving Day.

The tokens are free for anyone to mint beginning on the holiday. But the department store has structured the smart contracts of each token to ensure a 10% commission from every resale in the secondary market in perpetuity. The proceeds will be donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

By employing NFT technology in this way, Macy's said it is forging a path of charitable contributions that go far beyond what traditional methods can typically achieve.

The NFTs will also come in various degrees of rarity, including classic, rare, and ultra rare, the company said. For the ultra-rare category, Macy's will set aside 10 for a special auction — giving 100% of the proceeds to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.

The NFTs will be available on a first-come-first-served basis on the Sweet NFT marketplace, which is built atop the polygon blockchain.

The artworks are based on Macy's archival and creative content from the late 1920s through today. The NFTs are designed by Reometry, a digital agency led by NFT artists REO and Seth Brown.

The NFT market has seen explosive growth this year as sales of digital art items hover at a monthly rate of about $2 billion, according to JPMorgan, a big increase from monthly sales volume of about $400 million at the start of the year. The market cap of the NFT universe has grown to about $7 billion, according to the bank.

NFTs are digital representations of artwork, sports cards, or other collectibles tied to a blockchain, typically on ethereum. Each NFT has a signature that can be verified in the public ledger and cannot be duplicated nor edited.

When people buy NFTs, they gain the rights to the unique token on the blockchain, not the artworks themselves. But the fact that the information on a blockchain is next to impossible to alter makes NFTs appealing, especially to artists.