How to Profit From Video Games…Without Even Playing
I’m in the market for some property…of an entirely different sort.
The property I want to own doesn’t exist.
Well, actually, it does exist. I guess. Just not in the way that you and I would reflexively define “property.”
The property I want to own is digital.
And, crazy as this sounds, digital property is the future.
I’ll come back to my property plans in moment. But first…
I write to you regularly about NFTs, or non-fungible tokens. These are one-off, one-of-a-kind cryptocurrencies that represent ownership of some asset.
Right now, NFTs are largely focused on the digital art world. But they’re increasingly popping up in high-finance as slivers of stock (such as Apple, Tesla, and others) or as digital bonds sold in the European Union. Soon, they will represent tickets to sporting events and concerts. And you’ll use them as tickets on your flight from Poughkeepsie to Peoria.
And as I’ve noted several times, real-world property, like, say, your house or a commercial building, will be an NFT more easily bought and sold on the blockchain.
But perhaps one of the more interesting glimpses of an NFT future is shopping and gaming.
Imagine a world in which Mall of America is a digitized destination.
A world where you could put on a pair of virtual reality goggles and “walk” around the mall. And you can walk into the stores. And you’ll have an avatar with your exact dimensions so that you can “try on” clothes to see what they look like on you before you buy them.
That world is coming.
And it’s built on NFTs.
The mall itself will be an NFT that investors can own, just as they own shares of a real estate investment trust. And they’ll earn a dividend from that, paid into their crypto account (likely in stablecoins, but other options are possible).
Each store, meanwhile, will be its own NFT, owned by the merchant or a franchisee who pays royalties to the landholder based on digital sales.
You can apply that to the gaming world as well—a world with well over 1 billion gamers worldwide at the moment, and which is expected to more than double in coming years.
A huge number of gaming companies are building gaming worlds and communities on the blockchain.
The key difference is that instead of gamers just playing the role of a soldier or driver or monkey swinging through the jungle in a pre-populated game universe, blockchain games are allowing gamers and investors to own the “land” in that universe. Or to buy or sell items of use to gamers in that universe.
It’s gaming meets unadulterated capitalism.
Land owners can build whatever they want (within the rules of the community), or lease the land to others.
Maybe in World XYZ I own a piece of property in a popular community where a retailer wants to place a store that sells something relevant to that world. So, they lease from me the plot of digital land I own. I get paid real money that I can spend in the real world.
The upshot is that these emerging blockchain games will be ever-changing as the world expands, just like a real-world community. And it means property owners will be able to buy, sell, and lease their property to those who want to build stores or whatever on a particular parcel.
Like I said…sounds crazy.
But this is where we’re going.
To that end, this past weekend, I bought an NFT for an up-and-coming gaming universe called NeoNexus on the Solana crypto network that’s sort of steampunk-meets-cyberpunk. I have no clue how the community will take shape at this point because the developers are still building out the plans and whatnot.
The NFT I own is a literally a ticket that, for as long as I own it, will send to my crypto wallet every month free “air drops” of NFTs that will be of use in some fashion in this soon-to-emerge gaming universe. I can keep those NFTs or sell them on the open market for whatever the going price is.
The ticket also gives me access to snap up properties of various sorts in this universe as they become available.
Maybe the best analogy is from Wall Street…
This NFT—this ticket—is the equivalent of a small-cap stock. No one knows what will become of the company at this stage, but the product it’s advertising looks pretty darn amazing. And as I await the product’s roll-out, I’m getting a monthly dividend—the air drops—to be patient.
Those air drops have the potential to be worth more than the price I paid for the ticket (about $300 worth of Solana, a fast-emerging competitor to Ethereum).
Just like a stock on Wall Street, the value of the ticket itself rises as interest in the product accelerates, meaning my ticket could be worth 2x or 5x or 10x my cost if I decide to resell it.
I’ll keep you posted on how this shakes out, and what the air drops I collect look like (and how they’re valued).
I’m not suggesting you race out and follow in my footsteps… As I always loudly announce, crypto is crazy with volatility and you must be OK with seeing the value collapse, as it does on occasion.
Instead, I just wanted you to show you another avenue by which crypto is changing our world, and through which there are unique income and profit opportunities emerging, if you pay attention.
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