Chris Jericho Compares The Advent Of NFTs To Podcasts Replacing Radio: ‘It’s The Wave Of Now’

Chris Jericho sees the benefits that NFTs can have for an artist like himself.

Chris Jericho recently spoke with BitBoy Crypto and talked about how he’s getting involved with cryptocurrency in its early stages, as well as the perception that some people have about the crypto and blockchain movement. Jericho said that cryptocurrency is going to make an impact similar to what podcasting did to radio and print journalism, and shared a few ways that it can help content creators and musicians.

“It’s not the wave of the future, it’s the wave of now. And there’s still a lot of people that are — it’s funny when you read the comments online. ‘This is the biggest scam! It doesn’t make any sense!’ and ‘It’s so stupid!’ Like, there’s two types of people in the world now. There’s people who understand what NFTs are, and there’s people that don’t get it. And as we move forward, not just on a yearly basis, on a monthly basis,” Jericho explained, “more and more people are understanding what the NFT is and more and more people are getting involved.

“I was just reading this morning that Ozzy Osbourne is doing one, Cryptobatz. So that’s why I was thinking — and I mentioned this to you before — when I first started podcasting, it was the same thing. People really didn’t understand what a podcast was, including myself. And then I realized, ‘Okay, this is going to start replacing radio. It’s definitely replacing almost print magazines and newspapers, and other places you used to read an interview. That’s almost going by the wayside.’ So it’s almost the same with NFTs in that the overall plan for the Painmaker is to do this series of NFTs as almost chapters which then leads up to a graphic novel. I’m sure we might, I never want to put any limits on it,” Jericho pointed out, “but I’m not really thinking of this as a graphic novel that you hold in your hand, you know? It’s more of a graphic novel that we’re doing as an NFT.

“And I think it’s the same, in kind of explaining this to the manager of Fozzy, about how I think musicians are going to be able to take back music, so to speak, by releasing their music as NFTs and kind of eliminating the middleman of a record company. And that’ll happen too over the next decade or so, if not sooner than that. You think about a band like Avenged Sevenfold, they’re working on moving their entire catalog to an NFT. So it really is something that people with forward-thinking are utilizing and getting into it now because like I said, when all the people go, ‘NFTs are a ripoff!’, when they understand just how important NFTs are and just how amazing the whole concept of it is and how useful as a collector of anything, they’ll remember that Chris Jericho was harping on it and talking about it and doing it early, early on,” he stated. “And that’s kind of always my mindset for anything that I do.”

Chris Jericho recently filed to trademark the image of his Painmaker character, submitting the claim with the USPTO on December 6.

During the interview, Jericho also spoke about launching his own NFT collection with Semkhor, which sold out of the first drop item. The second NFT, “Death At First Sting”, is a new chapter in the Painmaker graphic novel and is available for purchase now at this link.

Read More: Chris Jericho Returns On 12/29 Episode Of AEW Dynamite

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