Nearly a month before its one year anniversary, the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection has gone from an idea that "probably wouldn't work," to a business valued at $4 billion which "real" business people love to hate, and real celebrities own pieces of. This documentary by The Defiant above was made in June 2021, when the Ape NFT's were around $5,000 to $8,000 each. No one had any idea how crazy they would get then. Now BAYC NFT's run $318K and up. For jpeg's of monkeys, tied to the Ethereum blockchain! What sets BAYC apart from the dozens of other NFT projects?
"The art was inspired by our upbringing. We grew up in the cultural melting pot of Miami, where we skated, BMXed, and drank half our 20's away, in the parking lot behind the local punk bar, talking shit about music, movies, and books, our love of Miami, 90's hip hop, 80's hardcore punk, skateboarding, crypto culture." - "NOSASS," BAYC Co-founder (18:40 in the doc above)
You may hate crypto and NFT's, or love them. That's up to you. But this post is to let you know that Bored Ape Yacht Club is yet another highly creative business taking off that has some action sports roots, along with punk, hip hop, and crypto culture. I don't know about you, but it'd be cool to see Tony Hawk, Mat Hoffman, and other BMXers and skaters help them build a part of their metaverse. We'll see what happens.
Just found a cool interview with Nicole Muniz, aka vstrange. She's the CEO of Yuga Labs, creators of BAYC and now owners of BAYC, Mutant Apes, Crypto Punks, Meebits, and probably some other stuff. Cool interview on the creation, first year, and future thoughts for the Apes and Ape friends.
This recent documentary about the NFT/CryptoArt movement is only a couple months old, which is good in this fast moving movement. The New York company Adorama put this out, and it's a very well produced, solid overview of what the NFT (Non Fungible Token) technology has made possible in the art world. If you're an artist, photographer, writer, or musician who wants to learn more about what NFT's are, and how they're being used in art so far, check this doc out. It's under an hour long, and a great place to begin learning.
For those of you who know this blog as an Old School BMX blog, mostly, you've noticed that I'm suddenly writing all about this "NFT thing." Yeah, I started diving into learning about this technology a couple of weeks ago, seeing if there is something in it for small time artists, like me. I'm still going hard with the research.
Yes, when you google "NFT's," most of what initially pops up are the crazy prices paid for JPEG's or PNG's of pixelated zombie looking things, funny apes, and Beeple's $69 million auction price for a digital collage called "The First 5,000 Days." I just found another article about Christie's Auction house selling over $100 million in NFT art this year. Really. And none of these art NFT's are tangible. It's fucking weird. That's the crazy side of the NFT/crypto art movement.
But is there anything in this technology for a typical Esty-type artist, photographer, writer, musician, or designer? Yes, I'm glad to say there is. Here are the basics I've learned so far.
One: NFT's are a digital file tied to a blockchain transaction, which gives proven ownership. That little thing is the magic. It makes that one (or a series) of pieces of digital art rare. And in art, rare stuff can sell for higher prices.
Two: Pretty much any digital file of art, photo, video, writing, or music, (up to30 megabytes, I think), can be "minted" into an NFT.
Three: This whole movement came out of the high tech/gaming/crypto world, which means there's a fucking shitload of money around NFT's and crypto art.
Four: The price of entry is to1) get some crypto, Ethereum in particular in an exchange, 2) open a wallet, and 3) join one of the marketplaces, like OpenSea, Axie, Super Rare, Rarible, Nifty Gateway, Foundation, or the others that exist. Then 4) Most important, do a whole bunch of research to learn about how things work. Google or YouTube your questions, and dive in.
Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, (who dropped a series of 10,000+ NFT's called Vee Friends, in May), says to do your "50 hours of initial research" on any new thing. Then decide if it makes sense for you, or not. That's real good advice.
Five: Take a piece of your creative work on a digital file, and "mint" it into an NFT, which takes services fees and a "gas" (blockchain) fee, and show it off in the marketplace you chose.
If you do that, will your artwork NFT sell? Probably not.
Like selling art and creative work anywhere, you, or someone, still has to PROMOTE and MARKET your work to gain interest, and get sales. If you already have a following, you need to see if any of them are into NFT's already. Most average people are not. It's still a very new and emerging thing.
If you don't have a following, you need to begin building one. The main market for small creator NFT's (and the big series drops) may be a few of your current patrons, but more likely will be a whole lot of "traders" or "flippers." These people are buying and flipping NFT's like day traders in the stock market, or sports card/collectible traders. They want to find new projects that have potential to grow, and they want to buy your NTF's CHEAP! Cheap is $150 to $200, maybe $300, or less in NFT land. These traders want to buy into your work, and resell it quickly for a 10X or 20X gain, that's 10 or 20 times what they paid for it.
So if your NFT costs you $80 to mint, and you sell it for $150 to a trader, that trader wants your work to get popular, and take off, they're in it to make money. They want to resell your NFT art for $ 1,500 or more (paid in Eth aka Ethereum, usually). In this scenario, you, the artist, make $70, the trader makes, $1350, and a bunch of traders learn you exist, and will pay more attention to your next pieces minted.
To most artists, that sounds like a shitty deal. And for one piece, it is. But if you continue, and you do multiples of you pieces, (a series of 3, 10, 50, 100), then you can begin to make some decent money on future NFT's. That's the basic idea. Yes, it's possible you could do a series, and they could get noticed and take off quickly. But more likely, you'll have to spend a bunch of time online promoting your work to people who have a sports card trader mentality.
So if you want to jump into NFT's and sell one NFT of your epic painting for $5,000, that's not going to happen. Unless your physical paintings already sell for that kind of prices, then it might. Most small time artists, I think, will either try selling NFT's, and fail, because they aren't willing to do the marketing or promotion necessary. Then they'll post somewhere saying "NFT's suck!" and stay on Etsy or in their own Shopify store selling pieces. Hey, that's fine, NFT's are not for everyone.
The artists and creators who are willing to sell for low prices in the beginning, to do steady promotion, and build a following over time, have a much better chance of success somewhere down the road. For people willing to learn this world, and do the work, there's a good chance of being able to create whatever you want to create, and make decent money at it, at some point. There are a lot of people from the crypto world doing this already, it seems. That's the upside of the NFT/crypto art scene, as far as I can tell at this point. When somebody's art NFT's take off, they freakin' LAUNCH. Ask Beeple. But his "5,000 days" collage of sketches took him 13 1/2 years to compile. So he definitely paid his dues.
So that's what I've learned so far. If you're willing to seriously market your creative work, NFT's may be really cool for you over several months time. If you're the typical artist that just puts a piece or two out there, puts two Instagram links, and hopes to make big money, don't waste your time with NFT's. I hope this was helpful for some of you.
Oh, and Twitter and Discord are the main social media platforms for NFT/crypto art. I'm on Twitter: @steveemig43 .
Investing in Stocks, commodities, NFT's, aka Non Fungible Tokens, and other investments that may be written about in this blog, are high risk activities, and you can easily lose money. Please do your own due diligence to learn about this technology, crypto art, and any other potential investment made in this blog. This blog is for entertainment and educational purposes only, and nothing I write or say should be taken as advice. Consult experts in any area needed before making investments.
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Like millions of people, I'm a big fan of Gary Vaynerchuk, I've been following his content for maybe 3 years now, I think. In this video he gives a fairly quick, 8 minute take on where NFT's (Non Fungible Tokens) were, back in February.
With my current, sketchy lifestyle, it's been nearly impossible for me to take in large amounts of information, for most of the Covid period. As a homeless guy who actually does some kind of "work" every day, like art and content creation, I struggled to get any decent amount of time online to learn. The little bit of time I had, 1-2 hours a day, was mostly keeping in touch with people social, and quick blog posts, content creation. So I didn't listen to much of what Gary, and many others, were doing, for several months.
Over the past few months, in the limited amount of media I did consume, I started seeing the term "NFT" in relation to artists and musicians. I knew it was somehow tied to Ethereum, but didn't have time to dig into it, and learn anything about it.
NFT stands for Non Fungible Token. Let's start with "fungible." Money, for example, is fungible, one dollar is worth as much as any other dollar. You can pay for lunch with dollar bills, coins worth a dollar, a dollar in your debit card account, or a dollar in your Apple Pay account. Any dollar is worth the same, that's what fungible means. That's a big part of the point of money.
Now one big problem for creative people, of any kind, in the digital age, is that we all can share digital files. A book, a song, a piece of art, a photo, a video clip, whatever, we can all make copies, and share the copies, and millions of copies could end up being made. Nobody gets paid, and most are pretty much worthless. Creative people, and businesses, lose lots of money because of this.
So someone figured out how to take a digital file, let's say a scan of one of my drawings, and "mint" it, tying it into a blockchain, mostly the Ethereum blockchain. Because there is only one file tied to the blockchain in that transaction, and anyone can check that, suddenly it's "scarce." It's an original. When you do that, mint a digital file into the blockchain, that's called a Non Fungible Token, of NFT, for short. You can make NFT's out of art, photos, music, video clips, contracts, things like ID, any digital file. And people can prove, "that's the REAL one." You need to make them out of your own work, that you own, or else you get into copyright trouble.
This started among tech geeks in 2016-2017, and different projects started to happen. Crypto Kitties was one of the first. Crypto Punks, a group of 10,000, unique, 24 bit characters, was another. That one was actually tied to Bitcoin. Another early big one was Bored Ape Yacht Club, funny looking apes in clothes, all with different features. The Crypto Punks were given away, for something like 11 cents in fees. People did what people do, they collected them, traded them, and started selling them, and an aftermarket developed. Even though these are just files, the blockchain tie makes each unique, and potentially valuable, and this year they've been selling for downright ludicrous prices.
One of the 10,000 Crypto Punks sold for $530 million. Again, they were free, with an 11 cent service charge, in 2017. One of the Bored Apes sold for $3.4 million. A Crypto Kitty sold for over $3.4 million. Digital graphic designer Beeple, (who says he's not an "artist") sold a compilation of 5,000 of his digital sketches, for over $69 million in March. You get the idea. If you think the real estate market is crazy, it's tame next to the high end of the Crypto Art/NFT market.
The NBA did an NFT project called Top Shots, and raked in over $100 million. Gary Vaynerchuk did a launch of 10,000 NFT's, based on his own doodled characters. He made about $20 million, instantly formed a huge community of his followers, and then sold 5 of the original sketches in a Christie's auction for $1.2 million. So that's the insane side of the NFT boom, the 2021 NFT Art/Collectibles market.
On the much more sane side of things, a whole bunch of artists and musicians have minted NFT tokens of their work, and put them up on several market sites, kind of like eBay for NFT's. Most sell for $40 to maybe $300, plus some fees, when they sell. They pay (almost exclusively) in Ether (Ethereum crypto). You have to buy crypto, get a wallet, and then sign up to the marketplaces, to create, buy, sell, or trade NFT's. But there's a lot of that going on.
NFT's have a whole bunch of other potential, as well. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and Shark Tank guy, is stoked on NFT's. He sees a future where they may be the standard type of concert or sports event ticket. You may get bonus, digital stuff, with your game or concert NFT. They could be used for ID's, passports, and things like that some day. You can take your NFT into vitural worlds, there are actually virtual art galleries displaying NFT'sright now. You know that Metaverse thing Mark Zuckerburg is talking about, these are part of that concept.
So that is a basic look at the emerging world of NFT's. I've been digging into this world for about a week now, to see if it makes sense for any of my creative work. We'll see where that leads. If any of this interests you, watch the video above, check out the links, and you can find a ton more info on YouTube.
