Twelve-year-old boy makes £290k from whale NFTs
We built this really cool iOS app a couple years ago called Editional that was centered around NFTs. Anyone could create one, and they would mint so many editions, the first being the most valuable (since it’s the “original”).  I still contend that we were far ahead of anyone even today: we had the ability to facilitate multi-atomic swap trades even.<p>…we ended up closing shop. We were paying for minting transactions behind the scenes and the market was too expensive in 2018-2019. We made a crucial error there, but we didn’t think people would be willing to pay so much for transactions.<p>..boy, were we wrong. I just sold a couple remnants of my old Editional wallet for a good chunk of money. I had a…hard time doing it though: transaction fees cost from a minimum of $40 and and a maximum of $160 for those smart contract transactions. Add in the fact that every provider takes a large cut: from Coinbase, to NFT marketplaces, to the 10+ dollar fees to actually complete a successful transaction.<p>To be honest, I was intimately involved in this space for a while, and I don’t get it anymore. We had this hypothesis that the ecosystem would scale and mature as we went, but we didn’t see much of that at all.  It’s all gambling.  It’s not even cool gambling: the decentralized prediction markets I was particularly excited to see never really took off.<p>I got interested in the space because I thought: decentralized consensus is really interesting, how important that’ll be in a world trending lower on trust; but this crypto world is so dishonest that I’ve realized that trust is integral to most effective systems.