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Is it possible for me to become a millionaire with nft?

4 people share how they started making money through NFTs, cryptocurrency, and the metaverse

By xasanka xmadhurangaPublished 4 years ago 9 min read

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  • Some people have minted and sold their own NFTs or invested in crypto early to make money.
  • Others have invested in virtual real estate on the metaverse.
  • While NFTs have sold for millions, they're still speculative assets that aren't appropriate for everyone.

Whether it's NFT's (non-fungible token) being sold for large amounts at Christies, or the price of a single Bitcoin surpassing over $60,000, Web3, cryptocurrency, and the blockchain have exploded in popularity.

But many people who want a piece of the emerging technology don't really know where (or how) to start.

Insider published first-person experiences written by a crypto millionaire, an NFT newbie, and a crypto CEO who invested the equivalent of $2.6 million in virtual real estate, among others. Here are their stories and what they've learned from minting their own NFTs to buying up real estate on the metaverse.

A beginner stumbled into buying a Beeple NFT

Investments in NFTs can turn out to be long-term investments that can grow with time. Popular NFT artist Mike Winkleman, also known as Beeple, sold an NFT for millions of dollars at auction. His name is synonymous with the NFT boom and his work is considered chase items among collectors.

One example of this is a purchase was made by Edward Fairchild who stumbled into the discovery of NFTs rather than seeking out them on his own. After being unable to purchase a limited edition NFT once it went live due to assumedly high demand, he ended up securing one of Beeple's open editions at $969. Over time, as demand increased, the NFT he purchased went up in value to over $200,000.

Read more: I stumbled into buying a Beeple NFT for $969 and it's now worth at least $289,000. Here's how I bought it and why digital assets are the future.

An expert shares how he makes the best trades

Click here For BELOW

If you're interested in investing in crypto, there are plentiful resources, like public forums on Discord and weekly podcasts talking about the latest crypto trends.

You can also learn directly from an expert: Cooper Turley is a crypto millionaire listed on Fortune's NFTy 50 list and has transformed early crypto investments into million-dollar profits. To catch up on particular assets you are interested in and follow, he recommends finding several media outlets that focus on trends and see what they cover.

Read more: I'm a 25-year-old crypto millionaire. Here's what I use to make the best trades and stay on top of tokens before they trend.

Learn about the (complicated) process of minting your own NFT

Not all NFTs are high-end collectible items from famous creators like CryptoPunks or Bored Apes Yacht Club. In fact, an average walk in the park can turn into a crypto masterpiece.

Tobey Hazelwood turned a photo from his walk into an NFT and sold it for 0.015 eth. He says that people who are interested in minting NFTs should identify who their potential buyers could be as well as get into the marketplace as soon as possible.

Read more: I sold a photo of my morning walk as an NFT. Here are my 5 tips minting NFTs on Etherum.

Some have made million-dollar investments in digital real estate

The blockchain has uses that go well beyond NFTs and currency. In fact, some people have looked to the metaverse and made significant investments in digital real estate.

Andrew Kiguel, CEO of Tokens.com, made a million-dollar investment in property in Decentraland, a virtual open world. He said he made this investment because he believes the metaverse can be a trillion-dollar industry and has the potential to attract customers both new and old. Through this purchase, he can expand property, advertise products, and offer goods and services to customers.

Read more: I purchased a virtual property on the metaverse for $2.6 million — here's why I think it's the opportunity of a lifetime

In football, when a quarterback “breaks contain,” he evades the oncoming pass rush, escaping into the open field. To break contain is to generate chaos; it can extend the life of an otherwise dead play, forcing the defense to scramble. It’s a concept I also find useful in thinking about trends: Almost all big trends are conceived in a subculture—gamers, rap fans, teen TikTokers, whoever—but most of the things that get popular within those groups never make it through the barrier to the outside world. But when a trend does manage to break contain, it becomes everyone’s problem.

As I watched the now-viral Tonight Show clip of Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon uninterestedly cooing about their newly acquired Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, it occurred to me that I had probably just watched NFTs break contain. “It reminded me of me a little bit, because I wear striped shirts,” Fallon said, meekly justifying the computer-generated doodle of an anthropomorphized monkey for which he paid about $216,000. “They look like they could be friends,” Hilton replied, as Fallon held their two monkey cartoons next to each other. Of course this is how it happens, I thought to myself. NFTs have been an obsession in some of the more tiresome corners of the internet for the past year, and an extended conversation between two massively famous people on national television is exactly how that kind of thing leaps into the larger culture. It’s the reason a retired relative texts you to ask if they need to know about NFTs.

Celebrity endorsements—of a product, a brand, an idea, a haircut—have been around for ages, but they’ve become especially thick on the ground in recent years, as stars have developed their own direct-advertising channels on social media. For people with something to sell, a celebrity’s fan base provides an easy, responsive audience. You don’t even have to be all that famous: If you look up the Instagram profiles of cast members from C-list Netflix reality shows, you can reliably find them modeling Fashion Nova leggings or promoting some new app to their seven-figure followings. For products with regulatory red tape that makes advertising difficult, such as recreational cannabis, celebrities are the best way to get people talking about your product.

Read: America’s best drug dealers are A-list celebrities

Hilton and Fallon have abundant company on the Hollywood NFT hype train—Reese Witherspoon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Steph Curry, and Eminem have all hopped on recently. But even in a culture inured to celebrity shills, the Tonight Show clip produced an outsize response. A tweet of the video with thousands of shares called it “deeply strange.” The journalist Max Read described it as “profoundly unsettling.” There is indeed something disquieting about the whole scene—or maybe, that the scene took place at all. With NFTs, America may have reached the logical extreme of celebrity endorsements.

If no one has cornered you at a party to explain this to you yet, NFT stands for non-fungible token, which is an unalterable digital receipt that lives on a decentralized public transaction ledger called a blockchain. In current practice, NFTs are tokens that usually correspond to what can be generously called artworks. The Bored Apes are, if nothing else, a pretty good indicator of the quality of aesthetic vision that you can expect to find at the top of the market. And the top of the market can be very expensive; the artist Beeple sold an NFT in March for $69 million. As my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany recently wrote, NFTs have also inspired a virulent backlash from people who worry about the environmental impacts of blockchain technology—buying NFTs requires cryptocurrency, and crypto requires an enormous amount of energy—but also from those who think they’re straightforwardly a scam. They very well might be entirely a scam, or the market may just be composed overwhelmingly of scams with some legitimate transactions here and there—feel free to split that hair however you’d like. Whether the technology itself will have more useful applications in the future is presently unclear. This is all speculative for now, in several senses of the word.

The murkiness around the point of NFTs makes Hilton and Fallon’s flippant conversation about their six-figure apes worthy of close examination, even if it wasn’t an endorsement in the narrowly traditional sense. A representative for MoonPay, the cryptocurrency-payments company that they name-dropped for facilitating their purchases, told me that the company’s celebrity clients all initiated the transactions themselves, were invoiced for their own NFTs, and were not compensated for public mentions of the company. The only placement MoonPay has paid for so far, according to the spokesperson, was for a recent plug in a Post Malone music video.

But because NFTs aren’t consumer products, the traditional understanding of a celebrity endorsement isn’t an adequate framework for understanding who’s profiting. As Read noted in his newsletter about the Tonight Show video, the Hollywood-NFT ecosystem seems particularly incestuous. Hilton, for her part, is already an investor in at least one NFT platform, and has sold her own Planet Paris NFTs for more than $1 million. There has been a gold rush into cryptocurrency start-ups in the past year, and because they’re private companies, it’s usually not clear who may have invested where, or who may be doing whom a favor. CoinDesk, a publication that covers the cryptocurrency industry, called the recent flutter of celebrity NFT activity and its questionable motivations “perverse deal-making.” MoonPay declined to comment on its investors.

Even if an NFT-owning celebrity has no financial stake in any of the companies battling it out in the crypto market, they have a clear stake in NFTs as a concept. When you buy one of these tokens, you aren’t buying ownership of the original artwork—the images are publicly viewable (and right-click downloadable) by anyone on the internet, and the original artists retain their rights to publish or reproduce the work itself. What NFT owners get is a new type of speculative asset, and for growth, they need the investment dollars of the general public to flood in after them. “Just as the pork-futures commodity trader is not principally interested in taking delivery of pig meat, so the NFT trader is not necessarily concerned with the usefulness or even the symbolic value of an ape,” my colleague Ian Bogost wrote recently. When Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon make dead-eyed conversation with each other on national television about how cool Bored Apes are, it comes with the very real likelihood that doing so will increase the value of their investment by recruiting new money. When NFTs break contain, NFT holders profit.

Read: The internet is just investment banking now

You know what? Fine. Fine. I don’t know that I care if some guy loses his shirt because he thought Post Malone or whoever else had provided him with a sound blueprint for securing his financial future via some type of computer-generated monkey doodle that’s particularly likely to get stolen. Someone should be out there protecting that guy from himself, but that’s above my pay grade.

Regardless, it’s gross. Watching two millionaires promote a mechanism of passive wealth accumulation while they unconvincingly pretend to be interested in “art” or “community” is viscerally revolting. Even Hilton and Fallon seem to be exhausted by going through the motions of revenue-creation in this particularly vacuous way. The Simple Life, the reality show that made Hilton a household name, may not have been incredible art (although I did truly enjoy it as a college student), but at least it was fun to watch. Perhaps the genre of celebrity that Hilton helped produce in the mid-2000s always guaranteed that wealth accumulation itself would be the endgame of celebrity endorsements. Hilton, like her Kardashian heirs and countless Instagram influencers after them, has never been all that interesting on her merits. Instead, watching people be rich is luridly entertaining, and what’s most fascinating about this kind of star is the way that they use fame as a portal through which endless stacks of cash can be pulled. Over time, the most successful among them have become more like traditional celebrities—the Jimmy Fallons of the world—but their enormous cultural influence has also forced other kinds of stars to behave more like them.

Read: People really, really hate the future of the internet

Stars have always done asset-based wealth building, just like any other rich person, but quietly—celebrities who buy up rental properties or fast-food franchises generally have not sought public praise for becoming landlords, or for extracting wealth from the labor of the working poor. Now everyone from Justin Bieber to Shaq wants to be treated as a cultural visionary for placing six-digit bets on the long-term value of a digital receipt for an ugly cartoon, and they want you to know this is the new cool thing, and there’s still time for you to get in on the ground floor. If Hilton and Fallon and their celebrity friends are going to go out there and pump-and-dump their way to additional wealth, they could at least do the rest of us the courtesy of being a little more discreet about it. Instead, they sound like they think this is stupid, and like they think the rest of us might be stupid enough to buy in.

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