I picked the Philadelphia Eagles to win the Super Bowl last Sunday. If you don’t keep up with sports, well, the Eagles lost. Still, I pocketed $23.92 nonetheless.
Kinda crazy, but so go the income opportunities that exist these days in Web3 and the NFT space. And to be clear, this income has nothing to do with buying or selling NFTs. In fact, you don’t even need to own one or even care what they are.
As I’ve written about numerous times in recent months, Web3 is changing everything we know about the internet.
Web1 was the first internet… the dial-up web of Ask Jeeves and AOL Online. Web2 is the current age of the internet, dominated as it is by big data firms like Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al. But now we are moving into Web3… a new decentralized era built on blockchain technology, the backbone of crypto.
The old business model in which giant companies like Amazon and Google and others control content and who’s allowed to post content and earn an income from their content is dying. I can hear the death rattle, and I couldn’t be happier.
All you need do is gander at recent headlines to get a sense the old guard is in the early stages of changing.
Apparently, Google is losing its mind over the emergence of ChatGPT, the AI-powered know-it-all that makes a Google search seem like a chimp pounding out answers on an old IBM Selectric (ancient typewriter, for any Gen Zs and millennials). The world’s (currently) leading search engine is reportedly in crisis mode as it struggles to dish up an adequate competitor.
Twitter and YouTube, meanwhile, will soon enough be in hospice care as Web3 social media takes off. Both are much despised because of their centralized power to curate content and de-platform anyone who runs afoul of arbitrary terms and conditions.
These two small anecdotes speak to a much bigger trend—that we hoi polloi are the ones who will increasingly be masters of this new domain. We’re the ones who are going to be monetizing a great deal of the content and opportunities in Web3—everything from audio/video content we create without the same censorship that happens now, to our own personal data that we will sell to advertisers and marketers.
And then there are the opportunities like banking some bucks on a gambling site, even when the team you bet on loses.
Our story starts a couple weeks back, when the team for an NFT project called Cubist Collective reached out to me. (NFTs, as a refresher, are non-fungible tokens, a type of digital-art cryptocurrency that increasingly represents an underlying business.)
In this case, the Cubist NFTs are relevant only to the degree that I own a few and the team knows me because we’ve chatted many times over the past year. They reached out to me for something different and altogether unique.
The team wanted to know if I might be interested in serving as a guinea pig for a new “prediction game” Cubist developers have created and are about to unleash on the world for anyone to use.
Basically, these games are a binary win/lose proposition: Who will win Super Bowl 57—Philly or KC? Will Rihanna lip-sync her Super Bowl halftime show—yes or no?
Players wager a bit of cryptocurrency guessing at the right answer. The games are entirely parimutuel, meaning this is a straight-up bet between users, no house odds involved. Winners proportionally share all crypto wagered…losers go home. The house simply collects a fee—the so-called vigorish—for providing the betting venue.
Cubist has been running prediction games online largely focused on whether the closing price for various NFT mints will be above or below a certain level. (Mints are like initial public offerings on Wall Street—the first time an NFT starts trading publicly.)
But Cubist decided to expand the project by creating a version that anyone can use. Recognizing that most of us are not software developers and get confused by too many buttons on a TV remote, the Cubist team built an easy-to-follow, do-it-yourself process for building and profiting from your own prediction game.
They wanted to know if I’d be interested in test-driving the process—start to finish—with my Twitter followers to gauge the ease or difficulty a non-developer confronts in building and deploying a prediction game.
Of course, I said yes.
No reason to bore you with the technicals. I will just say instead that the process is incredibly simple, which is really what matters… because the point here is that what Cubist is offering exemplifies the new paths by which the typical Web3 user will be able to monetize content.
I went through all the initial programming steps in about 12 minutes. I created and deployed Jeffo’s Super Bowl 57 Prediction Game in about seven minutes. And over three days I tweeted about the contest four or five times to advertise it.
In the end, gamblers wagered just under $1,000 on the outcome of Super Bowl 57. The Cubist team told me they were surprised by the sum, since it had taken them several weeks of running prediction games to reach that level.
For my efforts, I picked up 2.08 Solana in fees (about $47.84 when Solana, the cryptocurrency in which the wagering was denominated, was trading in the range of $23 per token). I split that with son, who ran the game with me… thus my $23.92 profit, despite losing a bet that the Eagles would win.
That’s not a lot of money, obviously. But I can see the potential.
Regularly run unique and interesting prediction games, build a base of followers on Twitter, Facebook, or any social media site, regularly promote the games, and watch as potentially thousands of dollars in fee income rolls in over the course of year… all for very little work. My bet is that we’re going to see a lot more of these opportunities begin to pop up.
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