As NFTs Grow in Popularity, Some Collectors Are Striking it Rich

“It comes down to fandom,” he added.

Similarly, what many NFT artists create or collectors invest in will be worth little or nothing in the long term. But there are a few NFTs that have become very valuable and have earned their owners and creators a vast sum of money in a short period of time.

The Bored Apes that Mr. Pollak bought, for example, could be minted — i.e. go to market — at .08 Ether ($200 last spring). Now, less than a year later, the cheapest one is worth about 73 Ether (about $190,000). (Ether can be converted to cash on major cryptocurrency platforms like Coinbase and Gemini and then transferred to a bank account.)

Claire Silver, an artist in her early 30s who works with artificial intelligence, is another NFT success story. In 2017, she was given three CryptoPunks, a collection of 10,000 unique pixel art characters generated from an algorithm, by someone she met on Slack.

“I was in a chat room about cryptocurrency, and I met this guy who was interested in art,” said Ms. Silver, who lives a nomadic lifestyle but most recently lived in Denver. He told her he had 730 CryptoPunks, she said, “and asked if I wanted three. I said, ‘Sure.’”

In 2017, collectors could claim CryptoPunks for free as long as they had an Etherum wallet. Now the cheapest one is selling for around 68 Ether (almost $175,000).

She held on to hers until 2020 when she heard rumblings that they were selling for a lot of money. She sold one in July 2021 for about $60,000 and still has two others. (Many are selling for six figures. One sold last month for almost $600,000.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/style/nft-art-profit.html