My multi-million dollar JPEG and the incredible NFT space

It’s been a while. Over the past year, I had been living a semi-retired lifestyle. Thanks to some fortunate investments, sports betting and crypto I was able to step away during what has been a shitty few years for everyone. Sure I was still placing the occasional bet, still investing in startups, but this all took an hour a day max. The rest of the time was spent doing whatever I wanted (apart from being allowed to leave the house… thanks Covid).

But at the start of the year, I saw an opportunity bigger than anything I have ever seen. I’ve ridden the Internet wave for the past 20 years and I knew this was going to be bigger than anything before it. Bigger than the birth of online gambling (where I turned over $1 billion), bigger than Matched betting, bigger than Sports betting, and I kid you not, bigger than crypto.

NOTE: Before I go too far along. We are in an everything bubble. Inside that massive everything bubble is an even bigger bubble in the NFT space. This is what happens with any new technology. We saw it in 2000 with the dot-com boom and bust, we saw it in 2017 with the crypto boom and bust and we will see it in 2022 with the NFT boom and bust. The key point here isn’t that there will be a bust (it will be massive and a lot of people will lose a lot of money), the key point is what happens after. What is the value of those tech companies that made it through the 2000 bust? what price are the cryptos that made it past the 2017 carnage? and the same will be said for the NFTs that made it past JPEG winter. A select few will make fortunes in this space, and a large majority will lose all their money. BE SAFE.

Since buying my first NFT in December of 2020 (and doing about 3 months of research before that), I have not stopped buying and researching the space. If you are not aware of the space, the current frenzy is around the 10k avatar projects, made famous recently by the Bored Ape Yacht Club, which was itself based on Cryptopunks. These are projects that take base layers and add traits on top of them to programmatically create 10,000 unique characters. When you buy one of these, you have no idea what you will get. Some are rare, some are common. People then use these as their social media avatars or try and flip them for profit.

You can think of them as digital collectables and like basketball and baseball cards, the earliest and rarest will increase in value over time. Continuing my luck in firsts, my first ever NFT purchase was a Beeple and my first ever 10k project was the Bored Apes. Beeple was the artist whose piece sold for $69 million and the Bored Apes are the second most expensive 10k project, with the most common varieties selling for $50,000 USD.

My luck continued as I minted a Gold ape, these are the rarest of the rare, with only 46 made out of 10,000. In the past 3 months, as this project has exploded in popularity, I have fielded offers over $500,000 USD and close to $1 million. I have also been asked to auction my Ape off at Sotheby’s auction house. 2 other gold apes have already sold for over $1 mil.

NOTE: I understand all this seems crazy and I agree. But we always have options in life, we can simply throw our hands up and say “I don’t understand this and won’t be a part of any of it”, or we can do a little bit of research and see if we can understand why these pictures might have some sort of value. It is not my place to push you in either direction. My only job here is to make you aware of this new crazy space and let you know how I feel about it.

My project

I have become so excited about this space that I decided the best way to learn was to create my own project. May as well dive as deep down the rabbit hole as I can. After buying hundreds of these projects, I have a feel of what will have value long term and what will be worthless in a few months. Taking all that knowledge and my past experience in the sports betting field, I created NFTeams.

What are NFTeams?

I’ll be explaining more over the coming weeks. But in essence, I am creating 10,000 programmatically generated sports teams. These will be part of the first ever Blockchain-based Sporting league. While the billionaires are the only ones able to buy NBA, NFL & EPL teams, anyone can become a franchise owner with NFTeams.

What do teams do each week? they compete with each other. So after we have created the league and have our own draft day, we will be developing a game much like the March Madness tournament. Your team will go up against all 10,000 teams in a month-long contest to crown 1 winner. That winner will be showered in prizes. Before it starts all over again the next month. Your team is your ticket into a skills-based competition each month.

The game is something I believe a lot of you will enjoy. The first version will be picking sporting event results. In week 1 of the tournament you will be put up against 5 other teams and your bracket will have 5 randomly selected sporting events that are happening over that weekend. Your goal is to pick the most winners out of your bracket (Line bets, Over/Under bets, so on). The winner goes on to do it again the week after as we whittle the 10,000 teams down to a final 8. Those final 8 will compete for the major prize.

That major prize will come from a $1million+ community fund.

In my 11 years of blogging about Sports betting, I only produced 5 videos. The main reason is I am an introvert at heart and it takes a heap of effort to put yourself out there on video. In the past month, I have produced 5 videos about the NFT space and my project. I am willing to feel embarrassed (and let myself look like an idiot), cause of how excited I am for this space. While I love the sports betting space, being able to combine it with the NFT space has made me a madman. I’m now working 20 hours a day and have the drive of the 30 year old Steve.

The videos will track my progress as I start from scratch and build out this product (sound familiar?). I’m using the same playbook I used to build up this site in the first place, learn and teach at the same time.

You can watch the first few videos below, and can subscribe to the channel to see the other content.

Warning: These are cringy and have a number of terrible dad jokes sprinkled in (especially the first 30 seconds of the first video).

So that is what I have been up to for the last few months. I hope you enjoy it enough to stick around and join me on my new journey.

How to get involved?

The NFTeams website will be up at the end of this week. But you can follow the Twitter account and join our ever-growing Discord channel. As always, I can’t wait to hear your feedback and if you had ever heard of this space before.