As Coinbase Moves Into NFT Space, Even Jim Cramer Changes Tune

Look at this: In April, CNBC Mad Money host Jim Cramer said that people who buy non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are buying things that don't exist. "We have people trying to price things that didn't exist; think non-fungible tokens," said in April. He wasn't saying not to invest in them, but he was equating them with bubbles destined to burst.

On October 12, Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges used by retail investors, said it would add an NFT market to your platform. And so, two weeks later, on October 28, Cramer said he was betting on the NFT market of approximately $ 10 billion buying Ether tokens.

"Honestly, I was gambling" Cramer said. “I was just betting on mass psychology. I have no idea why these things went up. "

Jim, CrAmerica are all crypto players now.

Like the guys selling weird tokens at a bar on Tatooine in the Star Wars universe, we're all playing with these weird tokens, most of them only have one bar value. Nobody knows why they go up.

I own the Enjin coin as an NFT game. I have no idea why it has increased 10% in the last week. The Coinbase announcement happened more than two weeks ago.

"The future has no gatekeepers," says Tom Hale, founder and CEO of the new decentralized NFT platform, Melon. “It's an open future where creators, brands and fans connect directly. We see a future where brand-creator collaborations and creator-fan relationships take place directly on a decentralized web. That's a future with more power for content creators and their fans, ”he tells me.

Perhaps that is why Enjin is awake. People see the future more clearly.

In short, NFTs are digital works of art, audio clips, video clips. They are priced in cryptocurrencies. They are sometimes priced in fiat. It is a new world. We are all just wrapping our heads around it.

Even the stars of the investment world, like Cramer himself, can't really explain it any other way than an NFT is something that players buy to use in a particular game, usually on the blockchain, not the X Box. . It's also digital art that I guess don't hang on the wall. On the other hand, NFTs are moving beyond art and audiovisual clips.

This year we've seen sales of Jack Dorsey's first Tweet, and in March, TikTok's own NFT experiment saw a sale of more than $ 500,000. (I don't understand. Who is spending that amount of money on this nonsense?)

Exchanges like Coinbase and markets like Melon are building on this new market.

Hale names a few social media stars who will be working with Melon to create negotiable NFTs: Swagboyq, Liane V, and Tim Chantarangsu, once known as Timothy DeLaGhetto. They have tens of millions of followers. Except me. I have no idea who these people are. But imagine if they did an NFT? Maybe it would be a source of income.

Coinbase joins the chorus

Coinbase expanding its presence in NFT should come as no surprise, as NFTs are reaching the general public. It's totally stolen thunder from DeFi.

Coinbase's announcement marks another step forward for the creators of NFT because Coinbase is the de facto gateway for most retail cryptocurrency investors.

Coinbase also has the opportunity to lead the expansion beyond Ethereum, the main blockchain for NFT for now. Others are consuming Ethereum's market share. Users have embraced a multi-chain future, and places like Coinbase can align with that to fully benefit their customers, thinks John Wu, president of Ava Labs, a team that supports the development of the Avalanche blockchain.

Coinbase isn't the first exchange to jump on the NFT bandwagon.

If you watched baseball this year, and surely the playoffs, you watched referees with the FTX logo on their jerseys. FTX is an encryption exchange. They also sell NFT. They hope to be the place where MLB players sell personal items like NFT.

On October 26, former Boston Red Sox slugger and World Series champion David Ortiz signed a contract with FTX. It will surely make someone believe NFT “Big Papi” for FTX, as Tom Brady.

Last year, a Brooklyn startup called Voice launched a platform for creators to make and sell their own digital art. Voice is billed as a cheaper alternative to Ethereum. They have joined other marketplaces, like Melon and the first OpenSea entrant.

Why invest, where to invest, what's next?

Why invest?

Because digital assets are the new stock market and everyone, including professionals, is diversifying into these assets. You can come in with a hundred bucks and let it go.

Think of what $ 100 worth of Bitcoin would have been when it was $ 15 per coin. That is why you invest in this space. This is why everyone invests in the crypto universe. NFT is the newest planet to form there.

Where to invest

Wu believes that a combination of investing in NFT collectibles and the blockchains that support them is a "sound strategy."

"An analogy to the traditional world would be to invest in both Sothebys and the art they handle for clients," he says.

As a cryptocurrency investor, I'd rather invest in a project that supports NFT sales (like Enjin), rather than try my luck buying the first piece of digital real estate created by a video game that I've never heard of, let alone. I spent five hours a day playing.

Thinking like a serious investor for a moment, I asked Wu where he would invest if he wanted to invest in the NFT space.

He said it would be a "clean" investment thesis to "buy projects that focus solely on NFTs." But the usefulness of NFTs can and will go beyond art and collectibles. (There is a project that sells NFT-style wines).

Are here:

"We are building our own NFT market platform for our own ENO Token because we see an opportunity to create a market for wine collectors who can use an NFT," says David Márquez, Blockchain Marketing Advisor at ENO, a project billed as a "decentralized wine movement to connect and spread wine culture around the world."

The idea behind your new ENO Token is that investors can own a bottle of expensive wine, but not appropriate it for their cellar. So with ENO you can create a digital winery and if you think certain wines will increase in value then you can sell them digitally. The actual bottle will simply stay in the vineyard. You may have your name on it.

Marquez has an OpenSea account. "My kids are into a couple of collector's games like Pokémon that use NFT," he says.

"Projects with NFT in games have a solid future because they already have a good use case," says Fares AT (that's what he says), founder and CEO of the Ghost game.

It says investors looking for ideas should join Reddit, Discord, and other NFT chat groups for intelligence.

“You will see how many people love art. The new generation of art is here. What is coming I think StarAtlas, Fog, or any Gamefi NFT should be an interesting investment once it launches. Aurory It also comes to mind because of the teams behind them. "

I've come to see NFTs as a mix of digital collectibles, be they images or audiovisuals, and items to buy in these new blockchain-based games (like StarAtlas) that vary in terms of quality and depth of play.

I guess newer games would be part of the metaverse, but I'll save it for another time. (Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is probably on to something again by shifting his company's focus from Facebook to something more reminiscent of the SyFy Caprica Series back in my day.)

“Today we can buy a work of art, music or digital video that has value in itself. However, imagine if we could sell NFT to invest in impact projects, offering the opportunity to obtain continuous financial and non-financial returns, making the NFT something alive ”. says Glen Jordan, co-founder of Empowa. He thinks the functionality of NFT is just beginning to be explored.

Empowa is using NFT as the basis for affordable home loans in Africa, where some countries will charge more than 30% interest on mortgages. Empowa works with Cardano. (I own it! Woohoo!).

When I look at their website, I can't tell if, like Zuckerberg, they really are on to something and we are moving into a whole new world; one for which we don't yet have the language or the best use cases. That is a hand. On the other hand, I think this is going nowhere. But I'm willing to bet that point of view is like looking at a URL code in the 90's and thinking that building a business on the World Wide Web will never fly. It's too difficult!

Jordan's idea is that the NFT is ready to break away from the arts and entertainment. A project like Empowa "increases the value of the NFT and attracts a much broader market of investors and philanthropists," he says.

Meanwhile, for Coinbase and other crypto exchange investors who aren't ready to buy funky digital art, Wu has a caveat: investors on platforms that don't support a host of crypto use cases like decentralized finance and NFT, even the ones. social tokens. like what Empowa is looking for, "you will run the risk of missing the cross-opportunities between these applications."

Disclaimer: The author of this article owns Enjin, Cardano, and Bitcoin.