The Nifty #14: Why are these photographs $200,000 each?

Wow! I have been M.I.A. and I apologize!

Real quick though: you have to listen to this recent podcast I did with Republic Realm.

It sets the context for a critical component of the NFT ecosystem: the metaverse. Republic Realm is investing $10mm buying and developing digital land. While it sounds ridiculous, the team literally ran a real estate development company before so they know what they are doing.

Also, I’m preparing to relaunch The Nifty next week and it involves a revamp of this newsletter as well. If you’re interested in being a beta tester of the new product, just reply to this email. I’ve basically developed a system to automatically monitor the NFT ecosystem, your NFT wallet portfolio, and more.

On to today’s newsletter…

Trying to Sell 100 Twins For $100,000

One of my first NFT podcast guests was a guy named Justin Aversano. Many people on this list know him but many do not.

I stumbled across Justin on Twitter back in February. The NFT space was beginning to take off and he was one of the most active NFT Twitter users I could find. If you were tracking the space you couldn’t miss him.

Prior to NFTs Justin had spent a couple of years creating a collection of photographs to honor his twin brother who was lost at birth. As part of this initiative he made it his purpose to sell the collection as a whole for $100,000.

The way he described it on my podcast, it was quite the struggle for a while. Justin went $100,000 into debt producing the collection and trying to sell it.

As a fellow twin I found myself moved by Justin’s story and simultaneously impressed by his audacious objective of selling this collection for $100,000. While his story is moving, I thought, nobody is going to pay $100,000!

Once he connected with another early guest of mine, GMoney, he was persuaded into selling each photograph as an individual NFT.

At the end of my episode, with Justin he gave me the opportunity to purchase one of the photographs for 0.5 ETH. At the time that was approximately $2,000 and I had never spent that much on any piece of art so I promptly rejected him.

We stayed in touch and eventually Justin’s collection sold out. Justin’s fortitude and ability to build a community is something to behold and I have enjoyed watching from the sidelines the entire way.

The prices of Justin’s Twin Flames NFTs have also continued to rise as they are traded from one person to the next hitting one high water mark after the next. For Justin, this is life changing. Every time a photograph sells he gets 10% and the other week they were selling like hotcakes.

The photographs have been traded for over $4 million at this point. 🤯

Then this week, Justin’s collection hit a new milestone: a floor of 60 ETH (or $168,000). That means you cannot purchase one of those photographs for less than that amount. That milestone was followed by Christie’s announcing that they would auction off his full collection later this year.

He originally wanted to sell his full collection for $100,000 and now here he is, selling it at Christie’s for what inevitably will be worth more than $100,000.

I wanted to share this story not just to brag about Justin who I now consider a friend. I didn’t share it just to show the eye popping numbers that these photographs are going for.

I shared this story because NFTs are literally changing the lives of so many people. The number of stories like Justin’s is only going to continue to grow…

Until next week,

Nick

P.S. You can check out Justin’s collection here and you can check out my interview with him here.