Jose Fernando Rico Mercado, 34, who co-owns three childcare facilities in Mexico, always does side gigs, including designing notebooks that are sold on-demand on Amazon. During the pandemic, his monthly income has dropped from $17,000 at its peak to almost zero. He joined Fiverr and set up a team of illustrators to fill orders for new NFT collections in mid-2021 to work there full-time. Since then, he has made $268,000 from NFT collectors.
The amount of money these freelancers are making seems phenomenal, until they are put into their full context. Valuable NFT Market 44 billion dollars in 2021, according to blockchain research firm Chainalysis. At the end of the year, the average value per NFT transaction is around $1,000, Chainalysis data shows — more than what three quarters Among the people who sell their products on Fiverr are offering freelancers, often to design entire collections.
“There’s a bigger problem here in the whole structure of how these economies build,” said Catherine Flick, a computer scientist and social responsibility scientist at De Montfort University. “You have to have someone working at the bottom who makes these 15,000 works of art.”
The NFT world’s unfairness in the distribution of wealth can be best seen through the Bored Ape Yacht Club, its billboard collection. 10,000 gibbons is loved by celebrities and those who were soon “participating” in the collection, now worth 2.5 billion dollars based on current floor price. You can’t buy a Bored Ape for less than $250,000 now. Seneca, the Asian-American artist under a pseudonym approached to design monkeys in 2021, has since said the amount she is paid for her work is “Definitely not ideal.”
Andres Guadamuz, an intellectual property law scholar at the University of Sussex, said: “It has become common to read how many high-ticket projects rely on low-paid artists and designers. “In some cases, the artist is at the helm of the project, but for the most part the art is irrelevant, and the value is in the white paper and the roadmap.”
Flick likens the NFT sector to a “project of colonialism,” in which the people at the top of the chain dictate the rules and have the capital and wealth to demand that those below them do the bidding. their. “The whole system is supposed to be decentralized to free the economy from these centralized institutions like banks, but what it is really doing is creating a new set of institutions that have almost the same function. “They keep the door open and take advantage of everyone’s labor.”
Seneca’s thoughts on being taken advantage of when the artwork was turned into a best-selling NFT was shared by others in the community. Tavis — who offers his illustrators a cut of the profits he makes from his clients, including about $20 for every feature or accessory they paint — is working on working on its own collection of NFTs in an effort to cut back on gig platform customers and increase profits. “I know right now I only make a certain amount of each collection, but if I were to make my own collection, the amount of money we could make from it would be more,” he said.
Just as contract economists rush to service the rapidly expanding NFT space, they may be forced to adapt to the next big thing if — like some guess— The NFT bubble is about to burst. If that happens, the prognosis is not good. “I think they can be a bit confusing,” Flick said.
Rico Mercado doesn’t believe the NFT’s heyday will continue, but he’s gearing up for a change: to the metaverse. “Half of the messages I receive daily are related to avatars and 3D designs,” he says, both of which are crucial to the metaverse. “Everybody needs 3D right now.”
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