The Seattle Kraken became the latest NHL team to have an NFT (non-fungible token) partnership when they announced Monday that they will work with a company called Orange Comet.
The Kraken has publicly led the way on climate issues in the NHL, including naming its home Climate Pledge Arena, working with NFTs could contradict that mission, given that NFTs generally are considered harmful to the environment due to the reliance on blockchain technology and its large energy footprint. The environmental impact in the real world is large, according to climate scientists, due to the energy needed to store the NFTs on physical servers.
“We need to call out a question when it’s just virtue signaling. It’s really not doing anything,” said Aseem Prakash, founding director of the University of Washington Center of Environmental Politics. “Now it’s a digital world. So people want to collect things which are digitally rare, digital scarcity. But I think the direction in which all this blockchain and not only (the) Kraken and the collectibles and the NFTs has occurred, but I think it’s a completely different direction and the wrong direction.”