Earning $400 Per Month… Just for Owning Goofy Pictures

An Update on My 2023 NFT Income Strategy.

An extra $100 per week, or thereabouts. Gotta say: Not too shabby, really.

Particularly when you realize that this extra dinero comes by way of investments that look like this:

Or this:

Or even this:

Now, you probably know where this is going. And where it’s going is the concept of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs—those one-of-a-kind cryptocurrencies represented not by digital coins as with bitcoin and Ethereum, but by pieces of digital art like the examples above. (And those examples, by the way, are NFTs on the Solana network known as, in order, Orbital, Oak Paradise, and DuelWhales.)

They are part of a collection of NFTs I’ve amassed over the last several months that are paying me very real money on a daily, weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, or quarterly basis.

In a dispatch I sent to you in late January, I reported on my effort at building a new passive income stream from NFTs. This is the update to that…

The income-generating NFTs I own are providing a range of services in the still-young, still-emerging Web3 space.

Admittedly, the services remain fairly narrow—largely tied to online gambling in various forms or Web3-based payment solutions or various types of Web3-centric financial services. (Web1 was the dial-up internet. Web2 is the current age of the internet, dominated by big data firms like Google, Amazon, et al. But now we’re moving into Web3… a decentralized era built on blockchain, the backbone of crypto.) 

What’s important here, however, isn’t the narrowness of the scope of these businesses. It’s the fact that these services serve as proof that the NFT space has morphed—and continues quickly morphing—into more than just goofy, child-like digital art.

These are real companies with real revenue streams. And they are sharing real income with their NFT owners in the form of crypto payments.

NFTs, then, are becoming no different in many ways than shares of Apple or Microsoft—proof that you own a piece of a company and are entitled to some of the profits by way of distributions, or what Wall Street would call a dividend.

Instead of a stock certificate from Walt Disney Co. with pictures of Disney characters on the face, NFTs are sort of like electronic certificates-of-ownership with pictures of characters attached to them.

It’s just a different way of thinking about “investment.”

As for my portfolio of income-generating NFTs… well, when I first wrote to you, I was expecting to earn about $182 per month. Turns out I’m earning almost $100 per week.

Since I began this income project, I have collected more than 60 Solana, the cryptocurrency in which I do most of my NFT investing. SOL, as it’s known, is one step removed from U.S. dollars. It’s a major crypto, the 11th largest in the world, and I can convert it into greenbacks in literally seconds.

So, it’s a highly liquid currency to earn.

With SOL at around $25 per token as I write this, the 60 SOL I’ve collected so far are worth right at $1,500.

I’ve collected those SOL over the first 16 weeks of the year, meaning $93.75 per week, on average (though I will note that I am not trading SOL for dollars. I am reinvesting it to buy more income NFTs in order to compound my earnings).

But those figures don’t take into account the fact that four of the 21 NFT projects I own have not yet started their distributions… and that three others have only paid out partial distributions as they ramp up.

What I’m saying is that once all of those projects are paying out on a more regular basis, my weekly SOL haul will be substantially larger.

Now, what was my cost, or what am I actually earning in terms of annualized yield?

My income NFT collection holds 97 NFTs from those 21 different projects. For some projects, I own just a single NFT. For others, I own 10 or 12. In all, those 97 NFTs cost a cumulative $17,400—roughly $179 per NFT.

On a dollar basis, then, they’re generating more than $4,300 per year in income, which implies an annualized yield just shy of 25%.

That’s orders of magnitude more than I can earn sticking my money in a bank. And if I shoved that same $17,400 into an S&P 500 Index fund, I’d be earning $289 per year—less than I earn in three weeks on my income NFT portfolio.

Yes, NFTs and crypto are crazy volatile, as the past year attests. And I would never suggest anyone stick any cash that they need into an investment with this level of roller-coaster action.

But that $17,400 for me is money I’m using to speculate on the ongoing growth of Web3 businesses.

Among my portfolio, I am sure there will be winners and losers.

However, I expect the winners will far outnumber the losers and that some of the winners have the potential to grow to such heft that they’re going to emerge as the Amazon and Google and Booking.com of tomorrow’s Web3-based internet.

So, that’s where I stand nearly one-third the way through the year with my income NFT project. I’ll update you again in a few months—when I am hopeful my income is more than $100 per week and my total SOL payments are well over 150.