All Nippon Airways (ANA) is also developing a metaverse travel experience that integrates the flight histories of passengers into their digital avatars.
All Nippon Airways (ANA), Japan’s biggest airline group holding company, has launched a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace on the Ethereum blockchain. The marketplace has aviation photography, digital collectibles, and other items. At the launch, the marketplace works with the MetaMask wallet and credit card payments in regular money.
The ANA GranWhale NFT Marketplace was launched by its subsidiary ANA NEO, which focuses on making immersive digital experiences across the ANA ecosystem. Luke Ozawa is a flight photographer who has been taking pictures of planes for 50 years. His work will be in the first NFT collection on the site.
Other collections include NFTs of two digital 3D planes, including a customized Boeing 787 that the airline launched in 2011, and a generative art collection called Airbits, which has pixelated airline pilots.
The company said in a press release, “The ANA Group will apply NFT to the aviation industry and promote the business to develop new connections with customers.”
ANA Holdings was founded in 2013, and said it is the biggest airline group holding company in Japan. It is made up of 69 companies, including ANA and Peach Aviation. ANA NEO is also working on a metaverse travel experience called ANA Gran Whale. This will let passengers’ trip histories be part of their digital avatars.
ANA is one of many airlines that want to use crypto ideas in their business. In March, a low-cost Argentinian airline expanded its relationship with NFT ticketing company TravelX to offer all e-tickets as NFTs on the Algorand blockchain.
TravelX also teamed up with the Spanish airline Air Europa in April 2022 to release a set of NFT tickets with special perks and events. In October 2022, the Latin American cryptocurrency exchange Lemon added TravelX to its platform so that users could buy and sell airline tickets.
