NFTs

I've been dabbing into NFTs lately. NFTs stand for non-fungible tokens. They're used primarily for video games and digital art. The concept of owning digital art is interesting and basically takes the idea of owning physical "baseball" cards and then applying them a digital form. With NFTs, you don't have to worry about devaluing your cards because you left smudges and bents as you would with traditional cards. In any case, I digress.

My first entrance to this area has been with the Wax platform where I bought some Street Fighters packs and individual cards in the secondary market using their Wax tokens. It was a multi-step process. I had to transfer my fiat dollars into Coinbase, buy BTC with that fund, transfer the fund over to Kucoin where I trade that BTC for Wax, transfer the Wax into the Wax account, and finally used the Wax to make the purchase. God knows how much I paid in transaction fees. So for anyone who said that transaction fees on these digital coins are low are lying to themselves. But again, I digress.

My second and not-so-successful entrance into the NFT market is trying to buy a pack from an NBA Top Shot airdrop. For this one, I had to deposit Dapper into the account. I went ahead and deposited $500 equivalence in funds using the Coinbase app. I think it was a little cleaner but not by much. That was last week as I waited patiently for the airdrop today. Today, due to overwhelming demand, by the time I clicked on the link, there were 185K+ buyers waiting in line ahead of me for 10.6K packs at $99 per pack. Suffice to say, I wasn't able to make a purchase. I am sure many of the more astute users were probably using bots or other methods to get a step up. More power to do them for being able to do that.

Not being able to get my hand on the airdrop, NBA Top Shot recommended that I go to the marketplace and make my purchase. I am not sure if I want to do that. The prices are significantly higher. This brings me to this point. That in order to make a "killing" on these NFTs, you have to be one of the first ones in for the airdrops and such and less in the secondary market. The airdrops have elements of luck while the secondary market requires some luck and market acumen. I am not going to comment on my market acumen.

I think the market is fairly nascent and there will me more opportunities to find these gems. I'll continue to look for them.