The non-fungible token (NFT) space has grown into a staggering $27bn (£19.8bn) market, with people around the world buying up digital land, music and art that doesn’t can be physically seen or touched.
A number of investors and companies in the industry are not only launching their own NFTs, but making huge returns by “flipping” these unique used crypto assets in a secondary market.
Recent data from Chainalysis revealed that reversing yields offers a much higher chance (65%) for a collector to profit, while only 28.5% of NFTs bought when minted and then sold on a market end up being profitable.
On average, the top performing collectors on Open Sea triple their initial investment each time they flip an NFT, while the worst performing group returns an average loss of 0.9 times their initial investment.
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One of the people looking to make waves in the industry is gaming industry veteran Andrius Mironovskis, who is striving to take the NFT ecosystem to the next level.
“I like to portray myself more as the Elon Musk of crypto,” Mironovskis told Yahoo Finance.
The former designer and former CTO of CFlow is now leading the world’s largest NFT game launch pad. Its Gamestarter fundraising platform focuses on building high-quality blockchain games such as Dark Frontiers, Crypto Fight Club, Pixel Pix, Demole, and others.
“We have our own game development studio and our own game store launchpad, which is basically the rocket to take our projects and shoot them into the sky,” said the Estonian entrepreneur.
“We also build some products with a focus on collecting all communities and crypto in one place.”
The company has game developers all over the world, including Europe, the United States, China, other parts of Asia, and Russia.
What is an NFT?
NFTs are unique crypto assets that allow collectors to authenticate, own, and trade authenticated original versions of special digital goods using blockchain technology.
They can be anything from digital, from drawings to videos or GIFs, but they can also be applied to a physical item such as coins or a stamp.
In economics, a fungible asset is something whose units can be easily exchanged, like money. You can exchange a £10 note for two £5 notes and it will have the same value.
However, if something is not fungible, it has unique properties and therefore cannot be exchanged with anything else.
When an NFT is purchased, the person buying receives a secure certificate in blockchain technology, which makes them the owner of that specific digital asset. Specifically, NFTs are typically held on the Ethereum (ETH-USD) blockchain, but other blockchains also support them.
It cannot be reproduced or replaced, and it can only have one official owner at a time.
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NFTs are transparent and no one can modify the ownership record or copy/paste a new NFT.
Due to this unique quality, the NFT market has become popular in recent years, attracting a number of wealthy consumers since its inception around 2014.
NFTs and games
According to an annual report by the Blockchain Game Alliance, NFT sales grew from $41 million in 2018 to $2.5 billion in the first half of 2021.
Meanwhile, NFT games generated $2.32 billion in revenue in the third quarter of last year, or about 22% of all industry-wide NFT transaction volume in the quarter.
Web3.0 has also opened up a new Internet, and Web3 games are growing and gaining adoption, with game models to win on the rise. Players can buy character fleets or stables and also lend them to others who are looking to play and don’t have the money.
“We decided to launch something more community-focused, so the dashboard was the first idea to bring more uncrypted game developers into the crypto market and help those who are already building crypto games.
“Working on this part, we realized that 99% of crypto projects aren’t very good.”
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He added, “In the gaming industry, blockchain tokens and NFTs can be used directly to obtain value from a company in exchange for services. There is a psychological side, a technical side and a financial side.
Gamestarter’s core functionality is to provide large-scale game ecosystems for NFTs and Initial Game Offering (IGO) presales. The platform’s native token, $GAME, can be purchased on the PancakeSwap, UniSwap, or Gate.io platforms.
Gamestarter is fully supported on the Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain (BNB-USD), Solana (SOL-USD), and Polygon (MATIC-USD) networks.
It’s a powerful platform competing with Kickstarter, but with niches in NFTs, indie games, and cryptocurrency fundraisers. Dark Frontiers is a standalone game to win with NFTs, allowing players to earn income in crypto.
In Dark Frontiers, players will pilot their own starship and conquer new planets, defeat opposition, form guilds, and capture new and unique NFTs that can be built or sold in open markets.
The $DARK token is the in-game currency in Dark Frontiers in which players can earn interest on their digital land and are free to buy, sell, and trade on the open market.
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“We know that in the long run, only game ideas that are gaming first, and blockchain second, are going to potentially survive,” Mironovskis said.
“Even right now, as we see crypto going down more or less, well-known gaming projects are still performing well and generating additional revenue for gamers.”
What’s next in the NFT ecosystem?
“A week in the crypto world equals a month in old-school business, and a month in the crypto world equals a year in old-fashioned business; this is how fast crypto is advancing, with all the technological and infrastructural solutions.
Mironovskis pointed to the fact that it has been proven that NFTs must do more and go beyond just a JPEG available for purchase that is built on a blockchain.
Although he thinks the NFT art world is in a “huge bubble”, he said the gaming industry is poised to explode as it generates a lot of funds and money through the marketplaces.
For example, players can rent assets such as weapons in games and generate income.
Earlier this year, Dark Frontiers sold out its in-game spacesuits within 20 minutes of its launch on Binance’s NFT marketplace, showing the demand for more elaborate gaming capabilities.
He said that NFT 2.0 will enable additional capability that will reach many areas such as nesting, multiple resources, responsiveness, as well as NFTs that can be split into a DAO.
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“I believe the second wave will be a social wave; social media apps and solutions to unite the entire crypto community in one place.
“NFTs are going to be the future – it’s decentralized, you can trade, sell, buy, generate your own, create value out of nothing.
“But with the great power of blockchain and many advantages, we have a lot of challenges. Once governments are more advanced and willing to cooperate with crypto, I believe we will enter the new era.