MILWAUKEE — You’ve probably seen some of the excessive price tags accompanying NFT sales.
The most expensive NFT project ever sold went for $69 million in March.
For the average person thinking about getting involved, seeing those headline-grabbing prices can be discouraging.
There are options, however, for those not trying to break the bank.
The best advice is doing some research.
“Do some reading,” said Garett Laugavitz, founder of Cipher. “Go on Opensea.io. That’s one of the leading marketplaces of crypto-collectables. They have some great blog posts. The NFT Bible is a great way to start to try and understand the landscape.”
But maybe you’re an artist looking to cash in on some of your digital work.
“Internet creators have really never had that era [of being paid for their work],” said Adam Sarkis, co-founder of Spree. “They just create something and it just gets shared. You don’t really know who made it.”
That all changes when NFTs are created. It happens through a process called ‘minting.’
“To put it simply, it’s assigning the token that’s attached to the image,” Sarkis said. “It creates a paper trail of who created this, how much it costs and who had it along the way.”
But the process isn’t exactly efficient.
“You need a desktop, like three devices open as you’re creating an NFT, or selling and purchasing,” said Sarkis. “We’re trying to break down the barriers and make it way easier.”
There’s still plenty of opportunity for collectors and creators, and the future success could come down to the amount of applications that evolve from NFT creations.
Even in the face of a market pullback, there’s a lot of optimism about its potential.