Paramount Announces Star Trek NFTs

Trekkies, rejoice! For decades, Star Trek has been one of the most influential franchises in the world, spawning everything from hit TV shows to blockbuster movies to all types of merchandise. And with a pop culture legacy that has spanned generations, Star Trek isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. 

Now, Star Trek fans have yet another way to connect to their beloved franchise as Paramount has announced an NFT collection connected to the series. Slated to drop on April 9, 2022, the collection is in partnership with Recur and is being called Season 0, hinting at more collections to come. 

The New Drop 

This first ‘season’ of Star Trek NFTs was made available on the paramount.xyz portal on April 9, 2022, and the sale lasted for only 24 hours. In total, 20,000 NFTs were listed and these included assets that are meant to tie into future play-to-earn games. 

In future seasons of NFT drops, Paramount is looking to further develop a Star Trek-based metaverse. Given that the series itself revolves around space adventure, there is not much limit to what can be done when NFTs and the metaverse are leveraged.

And this won’t be limited just to Star Trek but will extend to many of Paramount’s other intellectual properties. These will include iconic franchises such as Indianna Jones and Transformers. This also includes other non-franchise Paramount properties like Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, MTV, and BET that have countless TV shows, movies, and so on under their belt.

Given how loyal fans of all of these are and how much money physical merchandising brings in each year, NFTs could become a tangible revenue stream for the studio. For the fans, NFTs could be another way to be closer to the franchises that they love, in the material world and the metaverse. 

“Fans should be able to engage with our content wherever they are, including the metaverse,” said Pam Kaufman, president of Paramount consumer products and experiences, explained following the announcement, “Paramount.xyz will offer one seamless digital collectible experience for fans across our key franchises.”

If this collection is well-received by fans, we could see a wave of NFT drops across many famous franchises and IPs over the next few months and years. Given how extensive Paramount’s roster is, fans of all types of content could be getting their hands on NFTs faster than we think.

Live Long and Prosper?

While Paramount is clearly willing to bet on a franchise as loved as Star Trek, it is worth noting that the responses to NFTs being tied to popular media have not always been positive. Ubisoft, for example, generally saw pushback after it launched its NFT platform and released assets for popular games. 

Amongst other examples, this shows that simply slapping the image and likeness of a famous IP on an NFT collection might not be a foolproof way to drive sales. However, if companies like Paramount can deliver a genuine fan experience through NFTs, the stars are the limit.