According to Blockworks, Starbucks announced on Friday that it will be ending its NFT-enabled customer loyalty program, Odyssey, on the last day of March. The NFTs customers earned through Odyssey, called Stamps, will be transferred to the NFT platform Nifty Gateway, where they can continue to be bought and sold. This follows a trend of non-crypto companies discontinuing NFT programs they started a few years ago. Video game venue GameStop shut down its NFT marketplace in January, citing regulatory concerns, and social media platform X discontinued support for NFT profile pictures the same month.
Starbucks Odyssey was launched in partnership with Polygon in September 2022. Meanwhile, memecoin mania continues with dogwifhat, a Solana-based token, surging over 30% on the week. Supporters raised nearly $700,000 to put an advertisement on the Las Vegas Sphere. The purported owners of the hat-wearing dog put an NFT of the image up for auction, and it was bid up to 30 ether (ETH) by Friday afternoon, worth roughly $113,000 at current prices. Many new memecoins, including dogwifhat and intentionally-misspelled politicians, live on the Solana blockchain. Solana (SOL) itself jumped 22% on the week, according to CoinGecko. Amid the excitement, the digital asset arm of major investment firm Franklin Templeton published a paper on the value between meme coins and their native networks.
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