It is very easy to believe that NFTs and cryptocurrency are the same things, or at least that NFTs and crypto are linked in some indelible way. Indeed I have only just discovered that this is simply not true.
Whilst the digital Non Fungible Tokens that have taken the world by storm, are built and traded on platforms that are themselves sitting on various blockchains. They do not behave in the same way as crypto and it is dangerous to think they do.
One Man's Madness
To illustrate just how different NFTs are from crypto, the story of Degen Guy is a perfect example.
Degen Guy released a bunch of NFTs for people to mint and then later trade on Magic Eden. By all accounts the mint went well and the floor price once they were listed, was higher than the mint. So far so good.
I personally didn't buy a Degen NFT and so don't know that much about the token or the community, however I do know that there were talks of a game and the Degen NFTs being used in a play-to-earn capacity.
As is usually the case the Degen Discord channel served as a meeting point for members of the community to congregate and find out more about the project.
Also usually, as I'm finding out fast, the Discord channel quickly turns from a place of hope, love and laughter, to a toxic pit of bitter sniping and spiteful comments.
Apparently the guy responsible for the Degen project, announced that as far as he were concerned everyone in there was an ungrateful arsehole, and he promptly shut down the channel along with Twitter and all other social media.
Shortly after Magic Eden delisted the NFTs from their site, and as far as I'm aware there is no other way for the holders to sell them.
In short, they have had the rug pulled out from under them in the most vicious way.
Can you possibly imagine how that feels?
One moment you're sitting there with a few NFTs that for once are worth more than you've paid for them. Maybe you even sold one for a small profit and are hanging onto the others in hope of larger returns.
Then the next moment, WHAM!! They're off the exchange, no social media and you're left with a collection of worthless Jpegs.
How is this any different from the dangers you face when dealing with cryptocurrency? I hear you ask.
Well for a start, when you have a coin, once it's listed on the exchange, the original owner has not got as much power of the fate of the coin.
If they decide that they just don't want to do it anymore, then the decentralised nature of crypto means that either other devs will take on the project, or there will be a hardfork. Think Steem to Hive and Ethereum to Ethereum Classic.
In both of those examples something heinous happened on the blockchains, and there were forks and everyone carried on. Plus of course, the exchanges carried on listing the respective coins because people were actively trading them.
Whereas on Magic Eden for some reason, Degen Guy was taking off the market simply because the original owner had a hissy fit.
I don't know, maybe he even contacted them himself to claim some kind of artistic copyright infringement if they continued to list it. After all, they are a centralised, legally-owned corporation, perhaps they didn't want the litigious smoke that could have come their way
Whatever the reason, the points are moot, because if you were in that project, the end result is the same.
You've been rugged.
Community Gambit
Another major difference between NFTs and crypto is the reliance on community to make a good project.
Now don't get me wrong here, I understand that there have been many a crypto community that have hyped and backed projects all the way to the moon. Arguably the Ethereum community could claim such a title.
The main difference with NFTs however, is the fact that, with a possible few exceptions, there doesn't seem to be any point whereby the project can just run off its own merits.
An example I'll use here is the Baby Wukongs project. As you may have notice if you follow me, I wrote the first part of a story whereby I took the drama happening between the Monkey Kingdom and the Baby Wukongs, and turned it into an ancient Chinese tale.
The drama in question was the fact that the Monkey King head of the aforementioned Monkey Kingdom, actively tried, and almost succeeded, to block the Baby Wukongs from being listed on Magic Eden. The way people found out was via a leaked private message between the Monkey King and another member of the community, whereby he admits everything.
As you'd imagine there was a lot of positivity going around the Wukong community, the Discord was buzzing, and the project was getting a lot of positive feedback.
Once listed the Wukongs started pumping and before long there was a 2.7 Sol floor price (roughly $400).
I went into the Discord and told them that I was fascinated by the whole episode and that it had inspired me to write a piece of fiction and that I would characterise some of them. The response was wholly positive and lots of members found the concept funny.
So I went away and took around six or seven days to get it down. I actually think it was a good story and really should have spent more time on it, but wanted to show them and hopefully get a bit of extra publicity for them.
While all this was happening I was seeing a ton of retweets regarding the Baby Wukong billboards that they project owners had organised in Times Square New York and Hong Kong. This all led me to believe that the general bonhomie of the Discord channel was being spread around Twitter whilst the Wukongs were pumping on Eden.
All good.
Oh how wrong could I have been.
Very, it turns out.
Back into the Discord to paste the link and have a laugh and bit of banter with the community.
Tumbleweeds.
I then scrolled up to read the chatter and realised that in less than a week the Wukong Discord had turned from a place of love and laughter to one of toxic bitterness.
I scrolled up and up and up, trying to find some positive comments and had to go back days before I found any. There were people complaining about the billboard not being enough.
Others were complaining that Wang the head of the Wukongs was too silent.
Yet more were sniping that he had been on holiday too long and should be back promoting the Wukongs.
By the way, this last comment was on Boxing Day.
I couldn't believe it, everything was great seven days previously and now they were falling apart and the Wukong NFTs had lost around 95% of their value.
The reason nobody gave a stuff about my Wukong Scrolls story, is because the place was falling apart.
Perhaps because the numbers involved are so much smaller than your average crypto project. If the Dogecoin community fall out, it's so vast that it will never be all of them and most people will not even be aware of any problems.
As long as a coin is being traded and the price is bouncing all about the place, people are generally happy.
In an NFT project on any given day, you might get twenty trades out of a few thousand possible NFTs. So if a project's community falls apart it will effect sales big time.
NFTs & Flee?
So what now? What does it all mean? NFTs don't behave like crypto, so what'ya gonna do now?
Well I think I'm going to take a back seat, the problem is, I haven't sold one single NFT and if I buy a shitcoin, I can at least get rid of it, even if I do lose money.
However it seems with an NFT I can't even do that!
On top of this I have discovered a Solana coin called $WAGMI and I really think this could be the one. It's a great project which I'll write about soon.
Anyway the point is, last night I'm sitting there watching WAGMI pump, thinking
I need more Sol to get more. Unfortunately for me the @simpleswap lower limit for converting Hive to Sol is just under 50 Hive and I only had 18.
I was staring at my NFTs that I have and was so annoyed that I couldn't quickly sell one or two just to raise a tiny bit of capital. I realised that if they were shitcoins, I'd be able to do exactly that.
In fact I had recently transferred a large proportion of my funds from Oogi to WAGMI.
This led to me waking up this morning in a foul mood. WAGMI had pumped even further and I couldn't get any more.
I went into the Ducklings Discord and basically told them they were all shit and that they could have all of my collection at rock bottom prices.
I then apologised and said that I shouldn't be on social media when I'm in this kind of mood.
So will I sell them all for less than I got them just so I can get more WAGMI?
I think so, at the moment I could probably convert them all into around 80,000-100,000 WAGMI which I think will end up being worth way more than those ducks.
Perhaps I'll keep one or two back for FOMO purposes, but for now, whilst I'm grateful to NFTs for getting me back in the room, so to speak. It's back to good old fashioned crypto trading for me.
That's the future, it's my future and WAGMI is going to play a big part of that.
You heard it here first!
Do your own research, not financial advice, blah, blah, blah.
HOW HAVE YOU FOUND THE WORLD OF NFTS? HAVE YOU SOLD ANY? HAVE YOU MADE A PROFIT? OR ARE YOU JUST WAITING TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS WITH THE MARKET PLACE?
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
**NFTs & Me The Story So Far
4. NFTs & Me - The Paper Hand Wars
3. NFTs & Me - A Valuable Lesson About Rug Pulling
Cryptogee
Of course you could strike "digital gold" with some amateur NFT art project that comes out of nowhere, but your odds are much better with a professional team (usually behind a solid game - like The Sandbox or Axie Infinity) that has partnerships with real companies and funding from venture capital firms. Any NFTs I invest in (unless it's just an experiment) is something I plan to hold long-term. Almost everything else is a project where you will likely lose your capital in a speculative frenzy.
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