Who would have thought that taking NFTs, an obtuse item for people with more money than sense, and putting them in a vending machine was a good idea? Oh, right, a company called Neon was positive that it was on to a winner. And, to be fair, we would have given it a shot.

While we would have loved to travel to New York in order to buy an NFT from a vending machine, we’re South African. It’s hard enough to keep the lights on in this country. We’re not about to travel roughly 13,000km to buy a URL. Someone more… local… did try it out, however.

Vending for yourself

A writer for The Guardian, Wilfred Chan, decided to see what buying an NFT via a vending machine was like. They opted for one of the machine’s Color NFTs because a poorly-drawn pigeon would have cost them $420.69 (R6,350). The experience… didn’t go well.

If you’ve ever used a vending machine to purchase a bag of chips, you know exactly what happened. The NFTs contained in the New York-based vending machine are just QR codes in little cardboard boxes. When you’re dealing with lightweight items that rely on corkscrew action to drop into an access bin, it’s very easy for them to get stuck. Well, guess what happened?

If you guessed ‘The first NFT didn’t drop’, well done. The second one… didn’t drop either, but it did push the first off its lofty perch. But the woes don’t end there. Chan’s NFT… also didn’t scan. The code that was supposed to allow the reporter to claim their very own colour NFT was non-functional. Jordan Birnholtz, one of Neon’s co-founders, said, “That’s embarrassing, it sounds like you might have got a misprint.” Not exactly an auspicious start to the burgeoning field of vending machine-based NFTs, now is it?

Source: The Guardian