• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

The NFT on-ramp is still too steep

September 22, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

Years and years ago, to get a better handle on the then-nascent crypto economy, I bought some bitcoin. About $50 worth, if memory serves. And then I moved it to BTC-E, at which point I bought some random coins to see how that would go.

BTC-E eventually closed after a massive money-laundering fine, so I presume that whatever coins I bought back then are lost to the void. That’s why I haven’t had any disclosures in anything I’ve written about crypto since — I don’t own any that I can access, which is the same thing as not owning any crypto at all.

That’s no longer the case. After chatting about the NFT craze once or twice on the podcast, I realized that the trend wasn’t going away, which meant that I needed to give it a try. Most folks who write about football have thrown a football. It seemed pretty reasonable to dip a single toe into the NFT waters if I was going to keep covering them.

After doing a little playing around, my impressions are that NFTs are neat and fun and silly — and that their on-ramp is still far too steep for most folks.

Hello, I’m Alex and I am an NFT noob

To get into the NFT game, I opened a Coinbase account and bought $50 worth of ether. My goal was not to buy lots of crypto, use it to purchase NFTs and reap stonk-like gains. I just wanted to run the process and figured I could find some sort of unloved NFT for $50 worth of Ethereum’s token. I even considered buying a piece from an artist I like, whose physical art I own and who makes NFTs.

So, I moved the funds from Coinbase to NFT market OpenSea, where I also had a wallet. The exact linkage between OpenSea and MetaMask wasn’t 100% clear during the process, but, hey, I’m here for a good time, so I rolled with it.

Sadly, fees from Coinbase and transferring my pittance of ether quickly ate into my crypto wealth:

From this point, I figured I had paid the piper and was ready to buy something worth as little as possible, closing this chapter on my NFT mess-around.

Regular crypto users and traders know what’s coming, but let me explain for the rest of the crew. There’s a thing called gas fees in the ether ecosystem, the price that you pay to have your transaction executed. And it turned out that the gas fee alone for the purchase of an NFT that cost as close to zero as possible was more than the total ETH that I had in my account.

So, what I had done was turn $50 into less than $50 and locked the funds in an account on an art marketplace where I couldn’t afford to buy something that cost nothing.

Thankfully, someone sent me a pity NFT for my live-tweeted troubles, so I now own this. Which I can’t sell because I don’t really want to get into the tax issues and because receiving a gift is against journalistic ethics.

At some point, I guess I’ll sell the NFT, explain to my spouse why our taxes are more complicated than usual, and donate whatever money it is worth at the time to charity. I’ve received a few offers for my free NFT for around $300, which is weird. It’s like someone handing you a small plastic chit that has a pretty color and then having folks queue up to offer you several hundred dollars for it.

I also minted my own NFT of a Twitter thread discussing NFTs with a friend. No one wants to buy that one, but, again, it’s good to experiment.

This little saga closes with Thugbirdz, an NFT project that sports highly pixelated images of birds. I looked these up on OpenSea and found one that had a bird smoking a cigarette for a very low price. And it featured a “buy with card” option.

Bingo, I thought. I can just use one of my fiat cards to buy this bird, and then I will have actually managed my original goal of purchasing — as opposed to minting or receiving — an NFT. But after mucking around with the service to use a card — MoonPay — and verifying that I am in fact who I am, two of my cards hit fraud barriers.

No smoking Thugbird for Alex.

Anyway, all this is to say that I like buying art and I think NFTs are good fun. But the on-ramp to actually getting one is too high. Perhaps that’s why OpenSea has added 107,000 active users in the last week, per DappRadar, instead of, say, a few million. Folks who want to eventually climb through the software web required, and the huge fees that must be paid, will manage. But if NFTs want the more regular types like yours truly, the barriers need to come down a little. Or at least the fees.

Perhaps proof-of-stake will fix this. Or Solana. Regardless, here’s to tinkering. And helping Coinbase’s next-quarter earnings report by a few dollars.

Source Link The NFT on-ramp is still too steep

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Britain’s Raab, in Qatar, says need to engage with Taliban on Afghanistan
  2. Deutsche Bahn takes striking train drivers’ union to court
  3. Dollar drifts as soft inflation raises taper timing questions
  4. Factbox-How Macau is revising its multi-billion dollar gaming industry

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Ancient DNA Confirms Women’s Unexpected Status In One Of The Oldest Known Neolithic Settlements
  • Earth’s Weather Satellites Catch Cloud Changes… On Venus
  • Scientists Find Common Factors In People Who Have “Out-Of-Body” Experiences
  • Shocking Photos Reveal Extent Of Overfishing’s Impact On “Shrinking” Cod
  • Direct Fusion Drive Could Take Us To Sedna During Its Closest Approach In 11,000 Years
  • Earth’s Energy Imbalance Is More Than Double What It Should Be – And We Don’t Know Why
  • We May Have Misjudged A Fundamental Fact About The Cambrian Explosion
  • The Shoebill Is A Bird So Bizarre That Some People Don’t Even Believe It’s Real
  • Colossal’s “Dire Wolves” Are Now 6 Months Old – And They’ve Doubled In Size
  • How To Fake A Fossil: Find Out More In Issue 36 Of CURIOUS – Out Now
  • Is It True Earth Used To Take 420 Days To Orbit The Sun?
  • One Of The Ocean’s “Most Valuable Habitats” Grows The Only Flowers Known To Bloom In Seawater
  • World’s Largest Digital Camera Snaps 2,104 New Asteroids In 10 Hours, Mice With 2 Dads Father Their Own Offspring, And Much More This Week
  • Simplest Explanation For “Anomalous” Signals Coming From Underneath Antarctica Ruled Out
  • “Lizard Shampoo” And Pagan Texts Suggest “Dark Age” Medicine Wasn’t So Dark After All
  • Japanese Macaques May Mourn Their Dead – As Long As They’re Not Maggot-Infested
  • This Is What You’d Hear If You Listened To Voyager’s Golden Record NASA Sent To Interstellar Space
  • RFK Jr’s New Vaccine Advisors Just Recommended Fall Flu Vaccines – But There’s A Catch
  • Controversial World-First Project To Create Human DNA From Scratch Takes First Steps
  • Humans Weren’t The First Species To Travel Around The Moon. They Lost This Race To An Unexpected Animal
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version