- Actress and entrepreneur Reese Witherspoon is diving into the crypto world.
- She has been backing female-led NFT collections, like World of Women, and promoting the metaverse.
- "In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm."
Reese Witherspoon has been promoting NFT collections and forging ahead into the new virtual frontier of the metaverse.
On Twitter, the actress-turned-entrepreneur and her media company, Hello Sunshine, have been touting female-led NFT collections, like the World of Women, and the future digital world. At one point she said, "In the (near) future, every person will have a parallel digital identity. Avatars, crypto wallets, digital goods will be the norm. Are you planning for this?"
Her bullish view of the metaverse — where, like she said, people interact as digital avatars of themselves — comes as platforms like Decentraland and the Sandbox surge in popularity. Land sales in these metaverses are booming, and events like Fashion Week are taking place there in virtual form. Witherspoon's embrace of non-fungible tokens, aka digital collectibles minted on the blockchain, ties into the metaverse as experts have said NFTs are the key to unlocking the virtual world.
Her profile pictures have featured NFTs from the Flower Girls and World of Women collections. The latter female-led collection recently signed Guy Oseary, the music executive representing the wildly popular Bored Apes Yacht Club, to promote the project across other media like film and video games, Decrypt reported previously.
Witherspoon has promoted other women-led NFT collections, too, like the 1,989 Sisters and Boss Beauties. The artist behind one of them, thanked the actress and her company in a tweet and said, "You'd be hard-pressed to find a more prominent supporter of female NFT artists than @reeseW."
She's even begun diving into cryptocurrencies — digital assets that are backed by the same technology behind NFTs and the metaverse. In a February 4 tweet, she wrote, "Hey #cryptotwitter, I would love to hear about the most sustainable cryptocurrencies. Trying to learn more!"
Witherspoon is joining the crypto craze as the market for digital currencies has cooled off after exceeding $3 trillion last year. But it still tops $2 trillion, and the nascent NFT market boomed in 2021 to about $41 billion in sales — nearing the size of the traditional art market.
Meanwhile, Witherspoon's media business is undergoing a transition. Last year, she sold Hello Sunshine, which produced hit shows like HBO's "Big Little Lies," to a Blackstone-backed media company at a valuation of $900 million, Insider reported previously. She and her company didn't respond to Insider's interview requests for this story.