Q&A: “What is Goblintown, and should I mint a free NFT??”

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Oh, hey, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. Thank you for tuning in today. I got an interesting question for you.

I'm gonna do my best to explain this in a way that doesn't completely create more confusion. It is a question about NFTs. If you don't like NFTs, this is gonna be even weirder, okay? But what's happening, this trend that's happening in the world of NFTs comes from creators, sometimes companies, offering free NFTs, which as a reminder, digital artwork, basically some sort of digital asset that is non-fungible. It cannot be duplicated.

During an initial mint process. What is a mint process? We'll all explain that in my answer as well. Why do they do it? And they do it for a couple of different reasons.

And our caller today mentions a recent project called Goblin Town, Goblin Town, Goblin Town. Those assets were minted for free. Anybody could get one. And now they are selling for a couple of ether at minimum, which is $1,000 or more for each ether. So our caller is wondering, where can I get more free NFTs that end up being worth tons of money?

As you might guess, it's not that simple, okay? But I'll do my best, as I said, to be helpful and to provide some clarity. Detailed question and my answer coming right up. [Music]

Hi Chris, this is Mike and I've been following your writing for a while. What do you think about free NFT mints?

I bet you've heard of this, but if not, it's where an online project offers a mint of a few thousand NFTs completely for free. You just pay the gas price, which is sometimes expensive, but not always. The project earns money on reselling when people flip NFTs for profit to other buyers, paying a commission of six to 10% to the original creator. This got a lot of attention with the goblin town mints, which is where I heard of it. Do you think it's worth it to pick up NFTs when they're free?

I mean, the cost seems like a pretty good deal, but will people really pay for them later? Thanks. - Okay, okay, Mike, thanks for the question. Listeners, if you're confused, well, NFTs, we mentioned those. A mint is where NFTs are created.

So often a new project will have a thousand NFTs or sometimes it's 3000, 10,000 sometimes. And so through this process of minting, you go and you pay a gas fee. That can be somewhat expensive, sometimes $50, $100, depending on what blockchain it's built on. It might actually be very little. And then you own the NFT and if you want to, you can list it for resell on a platform called OpenSea and there's some others as well.

So now to the question, is it worth it to pick up NFTs when they're free? I think this is a pretty short-term trend, at least in terms of the value of renting something for free and then selling it for thousands of dollars. Nice work if you can get it. I doubt it is a sustainable business model. Also, yes, you might as well take something that's free, but just be careful because there are some security issues.

You want to use a different cryptocurrency wallet when you're doing something like this so that just in case there's something wrong with it, it can't get access to the rest of your funds. And last but not least, if you randomly receive an NFT in your wallet, most likely that's not someone being generous. They are actually trying to scam you or steal from you. So be careful. And yeah, I hope that clears up something for Mike.

I hope the rest of our listeners are not too confused, but just in case they are, I hope they subscribe and come back tomorrow because tomorrow is gonna be much more understandable. I promise. Great episode coming up tomorrow. It's one of our first $1,000 series and of course much more on the way, new episode every day. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

- From the Onward Project.