I know there are those who will argue this story is beneath me, but they are wrong! I first came across Stephanie Matto when the former reality-TV star (who appeared on something I have never seen, called “90-Day Fiance”) talked with a British tabloid about how her sideline — selling farts in a jar to obsessed collectors online — had sent her the hospital. Matto, who claimed to be making as much as $50,000 *a week* selling the jars, said she overdid the flatulence-inducing foods and thought at first she was having a heart attack, but it was just (you have probably already guessed it) gas.
“I thought I was having a stroke and that these were my final moments,” Matto told the UK’s Jam Press about her unexpected trip to the hospital near her home in Connecticut. “I was overdoing it.” Matto, who refers to herself as a fartrepreneur, started farting in jars and selling them online in November and documented the foods she was eating on TikTok to keep up her flatulence, like beans, protein muffins, and eggs. Matto was reportedly taking in roughly $50,000 per week through her highly profitable endeavor.
But wait! That’s only the beginning of this story. If you follow along a little more, Matto talks about how she is now selling NFTs — non-fungible tokens, a cryptocurrency invention that gives buyers a digital code that represents ownership of an image — of her farts in jars. This is some next level stuff!
Matto has launched a website selling 5,000 fart jar NFTs for .05 ether, which at the current exchange rate works out to about $191, not including ethereum’s notoriously high gas fees. In this case, ether’s gas fees, which are just transaction fees for the blockchain, are rather appropriately named. Matto’s new website claims that 100 of the virtual fart jars will be redeemable for real-world fart jars.
Another 70 tokens will be redeemable for used panties and 30 of the fart jar tokens will be redeemable for some of Matto’s used lingerie. “These NFTs are just as beautiful, unique, and rare as my actual poots! You can practically smell how delightful they are through the screen. Just use your imagination!” Matto said in a statement on her website.
All of this seems bizarre and incredibly stupid, and yet it is a fact that some people (mostly men, let’s admit) pay money for all kinds of things so long as they are related to attractive women, including spending thousands of dollars watching them eat food. So the fart-in-a-jar thing is not out of the realm of possibility. But is the story true? Thankfully, someone at Input magazine has tried to get to the bottom of it (sorry):
“Based on the evidence that the NFT launch was planned well in advance, that it was minted the day before the hospitalization story and that [journalists] used a three-year-old photo to show the influencer as ‘hospitalized,’ it calls into question whether this was really a story at all — or just a made-up PR stunt to promote sales of a newly minted NFT project,” says @interlunations