Art and Creativity: The Unexpected NFT Owner — a True Story!

Something interesting and surprising came across my desk today.

Actually, something interesting had come across my wife's desk and she was telling me about it. Somehow, I had become the owner of a bunch of NFTs without even knowing it!

How is such a thing possible?

Not that many people know this — as we start swimming around in this exciting new art ocean of NFTs — but one of the pioneers of the whole idea of collectible digital art is actually a venue called NeonMob.

NeonMob basically started out as a "collectible digital trading card" venue for artists, and they were among the first to actually offer uniquely identified limited (and unlimited) editions where every card had a uniquely trackable number. This actually started before the idea of NFTs was much more than a theory; 2014, I think.

So how did I come to supposedly having NFT's without knowing it?

Well, the way NeonMob works is that you get to open daily card packs containing two, or sometimes three, digital cards in various artists’ ”series.” The idea is that you work towards completing each set you start collecting. Since the number of cards in each set is limited — either by number or by time — eventually some of the series end up being ”sold out” or retired.

Of course, you can still trade cards with other site members, but the published quantity is fixed and no additional new cards are minted, and every card that was minted has a unique digital identity. They are, as it were, Non-Fungible.

What I did not know was that since the whole NFT movement has started, NeonMob has switched to a format where once a collectible artist series has been retired/sold out for a year, all the cards you own are essentially "converted" to NFTs!

As I looked around a bit, I realized that I had quite a few cards that I had collected back in 2014 to 2016 that had since been converted to NFTs. And some of these we're part of series that were very popular and remain in high demand today!

NeonMob hadn't yet developed its own in-app NFT market; the cards that are traded for money do so through a tightly monitored and moderated Discord server, while the actual exchange is still on the site's card-for-card exchange platform... I haven't tried to use that process yet, but I imagine that once the trade is "locked in" the exchange takes the form of swapping your valuable card you got paid for for a very common card of no commercial value.

Anyway, the whole thing was just sort of interesting and surprising... seems like the NFT movement is taking hold in many different ways!

Thanks for stopping by! Please feel free to leave a comment if anything in the post inspired you to do so!

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