Would you buy an NFT for $1,000? How about for $10?
With the recent staggering losses in the crypto market, speculators have fled the once-frothy NFT market, taking what was left of their money with them. Floor prices for top collections have crashed to earth. Now some people in the industry producing original digital art—as opposed to collectible PFP (profile picture) collections like Bored Apes and CryptoPunks—are attempting to create a grassroots, sustainable business model that has a low bar for entry and doesn’t rely on speculation.
One deceptively simple idea gaining steam: selling NFTs that are cheap.
“We’re producing value out of thin air. It’s alchemy.”
Take Mike Pollard, who in 2021 began work on a marketplace for reasonably priced music NFTs called Nina, now in beta, which he describes as a kind of “crypto Bandcamp.”
“The models being used for selling NFTs, like auctions and bonding curves, along with the high fees on platforms like Ethereum, made it necessary to sell NFTs at high prices,” he told me.
Nina, by contrast, allows musicians to sell tracks at prices they set, without input from rent-seeking intermediaries. The result, Pollard said, is that tracks go for around $10.
Of course, there are still sellers with an outsized sense of their contribution to the art world. “One artist tried to sell a track for $1 million,” he said. “It did not sell.”
By and large, Nina’s artisans are attempting to create a more rational…
