In 2017, when William Quigley started an NFT platform, he wasn’t known as the “King of NFTs.” Instead, his Wall Street and tech friends wondered, with a little concern, what he was doing. In the early days, the Worldwide Asset eXchange (WAX) had around 400k members. It was decent, but not record setting.
Fast forward to 2021 and everything has changed. A confluence of events, including the pandemic sending everyone home and having extra free time, advancements in technology, the rise of public interest in cryptocurrencies, trading meme stocks online and a more comfortable feeling for new technologies, led to the boom in the NFT market. WAX rapidly grew to over 10 million members who are buying, collecting, selling and trading NFTs.
Quigley, the cofounder of WAX, a cryptocurrency and blockchain investor, the first institutional investor in PayPal, with over 25 years of experience as a technology-focused venture capitalist, explained NFTs to gain a better understanding of this explosive phenomenon. An NFT, he says, is like a tiny computer that could be programmed to send something back and forth through the blockchain. The embedded software coding shows ownership of the item. This creates trust nodes that you know what you own is authentic, genuine and provides trust.
People tend to visualize the Board Ape Yacht Club NFTs that could sell for large sums of money when the topic is raised. You may have recalled reports that Mike Winkelmann, better known as Beeple, sold a piece of work for $69 million at the prestigious Christie’s auction house. The sale placed Beeple “among the top three most valuable living artists.”
There is money to be made in this space. As a side hustle or potentially a full-time business, you can create your own NFTs and offer them for sale on various platforms. You could also buy and flip NFTs for a profit.
Given the fast-growth trajectory of this sector, you may want to consider pivoting your career toward this direction. If you don’t currently possess relevant skills, consider taking relevant courses to upskill yourself. Getting in relatively early into a transformative sector usually leads to excelling quickly in your career. Companies can’t say we need candidates with 10-plus years of NFT-related experience, due to the newness of the industry. With only a couple of years of experience under your belt, you can quickly become a veteran expert and have great upward mobility in your career.
In addition to the traditional software developer and engineering roles, a quick search of “NFTs” on LinkedIn shows over 6,000 listings. The jobs run the gamut, including social media, marketing, compliance, human resources, recruiting, project management, attorneys and many other types of roles.
WAX’s mission is to offer NFTs to a mass market “in the safest, most secure, environmentally friendly and easy-to-use marketplace in the world.” WAX is also the leading entertainment NFT network. In 2018, WAX introduced vIRL ® NFTs, “giving consumer product companies the ability to directly link NFTs to physical consumer products.” Along with cofounder, Jonathan Yantis, WAX has “facilitated the trade of more than 100 million digital collectables including Major League Baseball (via Topps MLB collectables), Capcom’s Street Fighter and world-renowned entertainers Deadmau5 and Weezer.”
NFTs can be art, music, tokenizing real estate and endless possibilities. People are drawn to NFTs for a variety of reasons. Many people enjoy collecting them. It’s similar to the old-fashioned stamp collector or buying and trading baseball cards when you were a kid. Quigley himself is an avid collector as a hobbyist and understands the thrills of finding a special piece for his collection. After time passes, he may elect to trade up for something new.
There are people who like an artist and want to show support by buying their pieces. The safety of blockchain offers the feature to later resell the NFT for a hefty profit, if you are so inclined. The purchaser, because of the software, can be confident that it’s authentic. Quigley learned from his days working at Disney that it’s important to protect the brand. Having knock-off merchandise leads to mistrust and bad feelings about the company and its products. He recognized the need to ensure quality control that a consumer is getting the original and not a counterfeit.
For some who shell out a lot of money for an NFT, it’s a status symbol. By posting your NFT on your profile, it’s a flex that tells people that you are tech savvy, in-the-know and have the money to make a big purchase. A person may drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on an NFT the same way rich folks show off their Rolex watches and Lamborghinis. There is also a community feel to NFTs. It brings people together to talk about their purchases and collections.
WAX announced the largest free NFT drop in blockchain history. The “real flex here is the 10 million NFTs [it’ll] be dropping to celebrate the milestone. A drop of this magnitude has never been attempted before, and WAX is stoked to be the first—all while remaining entirely carbon neutral.” This works out to roughly over 15 to 20 million transactions per day, and an amazing approximate 8,000 transactions per second. Quigley points out that the power of his blockchain allows for this volume and is superior to other protocols, such as Ethereum, Solana and Polygon.
DPoS allows WAX to “process thousands of transactions effortlessly and without the hefty cost of gas fees. On top of that, it gives you the ability to stake tokens, earn interest and vote on community proposals. Really, it puts the power of the blockchain in your hands.”
This historical drop celebrates the WAX community. Quigley believes that this is not a passing fad and will endure the test of time. His logic is that while Bored Apes may go out of favor, there will be new artists and works that will capture the attention of collectors. He reasons that we don’t throw away our iPhones once we get bored with playing Angry Birds. Instead, we find new games to play. It’s the same way with NFTs. There will be dynamic innovations, changes and growth in this space.
Source: Forbes
