Visa (NYSE:) got itself a fancy new Twitter (NYSE:) avatar this August, and even though it didn’t stay up for long, the 8-bit-styled picture of a visibly unamused woman with a stylish mohawk still made dozens of headlines. This was more than the rather large sum. Price tag: $150,000. Just the fact that the financial titan bought an NFT token, representing CryptoPunks’ image, set off fireworks within the media. It was the best marketing spend Visa’s done all year — the ROI on news articles alone must have paid for the purchase tenfold.

Yes! Visa “apes in” on NFTs these daysNFT collectors, to coin a term, lose a lot in this era of wealth pouringJPEGs with apes have been viewed by millions. But even though the technology’s journey from memes to riches has taken it into the digital art world, I don’t think that this will be its mass-market use case.