6 Ways to Make Money with NFTs
It seems NFTs are all anyone interested in making quick money can talk about nowadays. Basically every rapper, sports apparel brand, and degenerate millennial is trying to hop on the trend and make as much money before the bubble bursts. If you are afraid of missing out on all the money being made in this industry right now, this article will help give you 7 different avenues that you can venture down to begin earning money almost instantly.
1. Create and Sell Your Own NFTs
The first way to make money with NFTs is simply to create your own and sell them on any general marketplace like Opensea or Solanart. This strategy is effective if you are already a pretty well-established artist or person with a large audience of people who you know will want to buy your stuff. To truly build a successful NFT project that resonates with a large number of people is really hard. Most NFT projects lose their value within a month of launching because a lot of this space is hype-driven and when the hype moves to another project, all the money follows it. To make a really successful project also usually requires a team of people with different skill sets such as web design, community building, graphic design, and digital marketing.
Obviously hiring a full team to create NFTs is not necessary if you are not trying to build a huge project. If you are a freelance photographer or graphic designer, you can create a collection of images yourself and list them for sale as NFTs on Opensea without spending a penny (besides gas fees), but do not expect to make millions of dollars doing so.
2. Buying and Flipping
The next way is more common for people who want to profit from NFTs without going through the hassle of building one themselves. Buying and flipping NFTs is a really easy way to make a lot of money in this space. The idea is that you buy or mint an NFT at a price that you believe is undervalued and sell it for a profit at a higher price.
Some ways to succeed in this method include joining discords and following big NFT influencers on Twitter like GaryVee and watching for projects that they shill or start themselves which are likely to garner a lot of hype. Then the next course of action is to try to secure whitelist spots on these hype guaranteed projects so that you get to mint at a cheaper price before it gets listed on the secondary market with an inflated price tag. Getting whitelisted is often hard and requires a lot of effort and commitment so be sure to pick projects that you know are worth the time and energy.
As this method is a form of trading and is very risky because it comes down to luck a lot of the time, it is not recommended to put more money than you can afford to lose in NFTs because they are not as easy to sell as cryptocurrencies.
3. Rent Your NFT
Got an NFT that is just sitting in your wallet collecting digital dust? Well, you can now rent out your NFTs to other people to use for a set period of time. During that time, you set a daily fee that they pay for each day they lease the NFT from you. This method is particularly popular among card trading NFT games, where users who want to boost their chances of winning a game can borrow expensive rare cards at a fraction of the price and enjoy the benefits for a particular amount of time to level up.
The leading platform that allows renting and lending out NFTs currently Is known as reNFT. So this is one cool method to try if you have a few NFTs that you are just holding on to that you do not really want to sell yet but still want to earn some money on the side from.
4. NFT Gaming
NFT gaming has blown up in popularity over the past year with games like Axie Infinity allowing players to make more gaming than they do at their day job. Many big names in the NFT realm are banking on NFT Gaming to be the reason NFTs see mass adoption especially as virtual reality and metaverse technology develop.
You can currently play several play-to-earn games in the NFT realm that pay you in cryptocurrencies and NFTs that you can sell on the secondary market for real money. The most known example is Axie Infinity, with over 3 million daily active users. In this game, you build up a team of ‘Axies’, and you battle other players and bots for cryptocurrencies. They have two cryptocurrencies that you can earn currently, the first is AXS (Axie Infinity Shards) which are valued at about $65, and SLP (Smooth Love Potions), valued at $0.02. There are numerous ways to earn these tokens including staking, scholarships, breeding Axies, and selling items from the game on the secondary market for a higher price.
Indeed, NFT gaming requires more upfront investment in the form of time and effort but it can be a really fun way to earn some money on the side for gaming.
5. NFT Royalties
The technology powering NFTs enables creators to set a smart contract that enforces royalty fees whenever their NFTs are sold on the secondary market. In other words, the creators can continue earning income on their sold NFTs, that is truly passive income.
With this, they can earn a share of the sales price of the NFTs in question in perpetuity. For example, if the royalty for a digital artwork is set at 5%, the original creator will receive 5% of the total sale price each time their artwork is resold to a new owner.
Note that creators often set these predetermined percentages while minting the NFTs. Moreover, smart contracts — self-executing computer programs that enforce contractual agreements — govern the entire process involved in distributing royalties. This means as a creator, you do not need to enforce your royalty terms or track payment manually as the process is fully automated.
6. Staking
Just like you can stake certain cryptocurrencies for rewards, you can also stake certain NFTs for tokens that can be sold on the secondary market.
For newbies, staking is the process of storing or locking away digital assets into a decentralized finance (Defi) protocol smart contract which basically means the digital asset is locked and unable to sell for however long you choose to keep it staked for. As a reward for locking it up and holding the asset, you are rewarded with either governance tokens which can be used to participate in the NFT project through voting or actual cryptocurrencies that can be sold into fiat.
Certain projects such as MOBOX, Splinterlands, ONLY1, currently offer NFT staking for real crypto rewards, and are worth checking out. Moreover, One noteworthy NFT project that allowed its holders to retire is the Genesis CyberKongz, a collection of 1000 pixelated gorillas that yield 10 $BANANA tokens every day when staked, for the next 10 years. For context 1 $Banana token is worth about $10 as of today, however, it once saw all-time highs of around $120 because of all the hype.
Staking is becoming an ever more common feature of NFT projects that want to add utility for its holders so it is important to look out for the ones that actually reward you in cryptocurrencies that hold value and have liquidity behind them, otherwise, it is probably going to be a waste of time staking them.
Conclusion
So it should be clear by now that NFTs are more than just jpegs you show off on social media as they can actually be used in many ways to earn you passive income in ways that no other asset can. People everyday are making life-changing amounts of money in this space simply because they have found a method in this list and got really good at it. So with that being said, which one are you going to choose?
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