If you've read my blog for a while, or follow me on Facebook, you've probably seen this photo before. It's a wall ride over my sister Cheri's head, at the Blues Brothers Wall in Huntington Beach. This is a still from my 1990 self-produced video, The Ultimate Weekend. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Old School BMX freestyle NFT ever created. #steveemigNFTs
I became a taxi driver in 1999, leaving my good paying Hollywood lighting tech job, after an injury. I've struggled in and out of homelessness ever since. After leaving taxi driving in 2007, which was dying due to new technology, getting a "real job" became impossible. I drove a cab againfor a year while in North Carolina, in 2011-12. After my dad's death, I wound up living with my mom, who I never got along with, in a tiny apartment, in a small town, in North Carolina.
In late 2015, I stepped up my Sharpie scribble style artwork, and began to sell my drawings online, just trying to make a little spending money. For about 5 years, I scraped by, though homeless much of the time, making money from my drawings. My large drawings take about 40-45 hours to draw, and after a while I could sell them consistently for $150-$200. So I have been a "working artist," but I was only making about $2-$4 an hour doing it. It's hard to get back on track financially making that little. It's pretty much impossible. Like thousands, maybe millions, of other creative people, I was looking for a better way to make a decent living from my creative work in today's rapidly changing world.
I heard about NFT's a few months ago, in an online article about a musician. They sounded interesting, but I didn't have much time online each day, so I never dug into seriously researching them. About a month ago, I found a library that's actually open, one of the few in L.A. County, where I can plug in my laptop, and work all day long. I started listening to some Gary Vaynerchuk videos again, among others, and he had several videos about NFT's. I watched two or three of his videos, and got seriously intrigued. Then I dug deeper, and I've probably watched 80-100 hours of YouTube videos, and read 20 articles, about NFT's, in the two weeks since. Yesterday I made my first two NFT's, and both are at ridiculous prices, intentionally, but available for sale on Rarible.
So what's an NFT? That's where most of society is right now, unaware of these things, or not sure what they are. "NFT" stands for Non Fungible Token. Simply put, it's a blockchain transaction tied to a digital file (photo, art, meme, music file, video file, in-game accessory, etc), and it's the only one tied to that transaction. So that makes it a digital item that's rare. NFT's, based on blockchain smart contract technology, make it possible to have a "one of a kind" digital piece of art (or music, photos, etc.). And rare things can be collected, flipped, traded, and sold for ridiculous prices, like old BMX bikes, baseball or Pokemon cards, classic cars, Coca-Cola memorabilia, or any other collectible. The crypto collecting began with Crypto Kitties, Crypto Punks, and Bored Ape Yacht Club.
So while you can copy that wall ride photo/meme above, only one actual NFT of it exists. Since hardly anyone in action sports has created NFT's, only 2 or 3 New School BMX photo NFT's exist so far, and my NFT above is the first Old School BMX NFT, which will could make it highly collectible... at some point. That's why I put it up for 1 Eth, or one unit of Ethereum, a little under $4,000 at the moment. Crazy, huh? It will only sell if I put out a cool collection of other, similar NFT's, and get some collectors, or flipper/traders, interested. Until then, it will just sit at that price. The next NFT's I do will be in the $40-$150 dollar range (+ gas/minting fees).
What the NFT technology does for artists, is it let's us sell a digital form of our work, and even add a royalty in the smart contract. So an artist can make more money up front, by creating their own NFT's, and can get a royalty payment anytime that NFT is resold....ever. When traditional art, like say a painting by a really famous artist, sells for millions of dollars, the artist doesn't get any of that, in virtually all cases. That's one big issue of art throughout the ages.
So NFT's, and the NFT marketplaces, and the whole crypto world they came from, now allow artists of all kinds to put work out there for sale, in a rare digital format, and hopefully make more money, and get royalties from that piece when it sells again. That can potentially allow a typical working artist a much better chance to make a living from their work, if they're willing to learn the NFT technology, and do the promotion involved to get their work seen an appreciated by collectors.
It took me about two days of research to figure out NFT's are for real, and get past the issue that people are actually paying money, sometimes millions of dollars, for something that doesn't physically exist. That's a head trip for most people, when they first hear about NFT's. But people have been buying song downloads for about 20 years now, and those don't physically exist. Gamers have been buying cool in-game weapons, skins, and other items in games, for several years as well. So there is definitely a market for digital goods. That market is tens of billions, already, in the gaming world.
So I decided to go all in on this idea, and start producing my own collectibles. I'm going to start putting out collections of NFT's, starting with video stills and photos, as a way to earn money to get my life back on track financially. Hopefully, after that, I can work on doing the long list of creative projects in my head, and those I'll dream up later on. I'm looking at these as "digital collectibles," though I do want to do NFT's eventually with mt Sharpie artwork, and perhaps other "art."
The NFT world is still really new, only going back to about 2017. For you Old School BMX freestylers out there, it feels a lot like 1984-85, when we could go to an AFA contest, which were new, and see 50 different riders doing brand new tricks we hadn't seen before. There are just new ideas popping up daily in this space. NFT's are an offshoot of blockhain technology, enabled by smart contracts tied in the blockchains, Ethereum being the main one right now. It all started in the crypto art world, and the crypto rich were the first collectors, and still the main ones.
Then in late 2020 and the Spring of 2021, NFT's exploded into the mainstream art world, with the insane $69 million Beeple "5,000 Days" NFT sale at Christie's. Now there are collections of 10,000 character-type and gaming related NFT's dropping almost daily, and hundreds, maybe thousands of new and established artists putting out NFT's. So there's actually too much art for the number of active buyers, at the moment. But I think that won't last too awful long. There will be another big wave of crazy art sales before too long, I'm sure.
But it's still just crypto art projects, crypto finance, and artists in NFT's right now. There's very little photography, there's not really a lot of music, and things like action sports art/photos, and many other future uses, haven't really happened yet. But they will. NBA Top Shots is one of a handful of mainstream sports NFT projects, and they raked in about $100 million. Soccer/futbol is getting into it, as well as people like Mark Cuban, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mila Kunis, Logan Paul, and a bunch of others. Paris Hilton has over 150 NFT's in her collection. For real.
This technology has so much farther to go, in hundreds of different directions, that by this time next year, everyone will be talking NFT's, and be looking to flip, trade, or collect them. That's why I'm going all in on this idea. It's a huge opportunity for creative people, as well as gamers, influencers, financiers, traders, athletes, real estate brokers, the whole metaverse arena, and much more. This technology will be used in so many ways, that most of the world will be getting into aspects of it in the next few years. Including the Old School BMX collector guys (and a few gals).
So that's why I'm spending so much time in this blog talking about NFT's, and now beginning to create my own. This is a form of creative work that can earn me a decent living, in time, get me off the streets and into a decent apartment, and eventually fund future creative projects, like maybe The Ultimate Weekend II idea, or a cool indie art show, among others.
I started a Pinterest board to list and display my NFT's. You can link to Rarible from there.
For my first NFT, I used this photo.
And I put it up for sale for 4.343 Eth. That's about $17,341 right now. Do I think this will sell? Nope, not a chance. That was my point. You only get to make your first NFT once. If you become a name in the NFT world, then that NFT becomes highly collectible, and valuable. Most people ask a couple of hundred bucks or less for their first NFT. But I'm an actual homeless guy, who has made my own NFT's, and I do some pretty cool art, and take decent photos. My story is a pretty crazy one. If I can get myself off the streets, and I do some really cool work for a year or so, then, and only then, will this NFT be worth buying by a collector, maybe.
Until then, this is me planting my flag in NFT Land and saying, "This is a cool technology, I have a lot of ideas, and I plan to be here for a while." A lot of people, artists, gamers, influencers, celebrities, and profile pic projects, are just trying to become "The next Beeple," and going for a quick cash grab. Others are doing really cool art, or evolving in this world, exploring new ideas. I see a lot of cool ideas to use NFT's for, and I plan to just keep plugging away until one of them takes off, and make this crazy panhandling sign NFT worth somebody's money.
So that's my new direction. There will be A LOT of NFT talk in this blog now. But there will still be Old School BMX tales, action sports, other art, my views on our world and where it's headed, and anything else that seems interesting to me. Thanks to everyone who's responsible for one of those 130,000+ page views so far on this blog, I'll try to keep it interesting for a long time to come.
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