How much real money can you make from virtual art?

The rise of NFTs has caused the boom of virtual art in online marketplaces. NFTs are digital assets that can take the form of artworks, photos, videos, songs, books… if it can be a digital file, there’s a way to mint it as an NFT.

One of the net positives of NFTs and virtual art is that it provides artists more power, independence, and freedom in how they sell their art. Instead of submitting to intermediaries and the requirements of art platforms, they just have to mint their NFT on a respected marketplace and proceed to market their work and art on social media effectively.

Many skeptics wonder how NFTs and virtual art can truly become valuable if they are digital files that can be duplicated with minimal effort for all intents and purposes. Unlike physical artworks, digital art is perceived as cheap, even though the most expensive NFTs have sold for mind-boggling amounts of money that many physical artworks rarely manage to reach.

Let’s find out how much real money you can make from virtual art today:

What is buying an NFT?

Once you purchase an NFT piece of virtual art, you have complete access to the digital file or links where the file is stored to do as you please. Many people tend to display their virtual art as part of their profile pictures on social media accounts.

Virtual art NFTs have a specific serial number, and the transaction history of each NFT is stored on the Blockchain. It’s easy to look up the wallet address where the NFT was owned so people can take a look at who the original owner of the NFT is. The process in which an NFT becomes part of the Blockchain is called minting.

Some virtual art success stories

One case of an NFT appreciating and providing its early investors with a massive source of income is that of a young man who bought two Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs for just a couple hundred dollars and several months after, the BAYC NFTs skyrocketed in value to the point that he could sell both of his BAYC NFTs for a combined sale price of 84 ETH, at the time valuing $231,000. He had used the money from the sale for a down payment on a three-bedroom house in Los Angeles.

Who would say that purchasing digital apes for a couple of hundred dollars would net him enough money to upgrade?

For more information on the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, take a look at our article here.

Claire Silver

Claire Silver is an artist who works with AI, and one of the most awe-inspiring stories of NFT trading in history. Almost like a mirror to Pollak’s story, Silver was given three CryptoPunks by an individual she met on a Slack group about cryptocurrency. The individual had 730 CryptoPunks (imagine having so many in the present day.

Silver held on to her CryptoPunks until 2020 rolled by and she heard the figures that they were selling for a lot of cash. She sold one in July 2021 for $60,000 and still holds to the other CryptoPunks, which she could quickly sell for a combined price of over a million dollars.

On top of that, Claire is an artist who makes her own NFTs and earns a lot of money from the resales. Just one of her pieces of NFT art sold for 15 ETH ($63,000)

Thanks to buying and selling NFTs, Claire has obtained financial security. She came from humble origins, and thanks to the possibilities opened to her by the world of virtual art, she was able to materialize her dreams.

Virtual art can be a medium for us, humans to make our dreams into realities. As she expressed, she could walk into Walmart and buy premium products instead of cheaper options. It provided her with financial freedom and the possibility to travel worldwide, where big-name auction houses such as Sotheby’s were auctioning her work.

Collectors could claim CryptoPunks for free while they had an Ethereum wallet back in the day. A legitimate CryptoPunk for less than 75 ETH in the present day would be a miracle.

She used her money to provide her mom with a house paid for in all cash, and quoting Claire, she was getting one of the big red bows and stick it on the front door.

Alex Lugo

The story of Alex Lugo began in Lindenhurst, New York. Lugo was a trucker with two children and a wife, making $25 an hour. Considering the standard of living in New York, making that amount of money was practically insignificant. Eventually, Lugo researched more about cryptocurrency and NFTs to learn how to trade and change his lifestyle.

And was he successful in doing so, benefitting from owning real estate in the Metaverse near the Adidas HQ. This points to him being able to eventually sell these digital lands once Adidas or another major brand seeking to purchase virtual lands does so for a hefty amount. He’d obtain a return on investment from his digital real estate.

Lugo made enough money from these sales that, like other NFT artists, investors, and traders, he was able to upgrade and move to a two-bedroom apartment. However, he’s also looking to upgrade to a four-bedroom house in Lindenhurst.

Gossamer Farris

Gossamer Farris became a full-time artist based in Brooklyn, but it was only thanks to NFTs that she could get to that position without concerns. She graduated from college and worked a 9-to-5 at a student loan servicing center, doing her art as a side gig after work. Her art consisted mostly of illustrations, sculptures, and textile work. She’d also make small items like stickers people could purchase in her online store.

She had quit her job to take up another one as a tattoo artist, but working as a tattoo artist was a struggle on its own in the beginning of the pandemic. Then, the NFT boom arrived, and in the winter of 2021, people began releasing all sorts of NFT collections. Farris focused on her Filipino and Black heritage.

NFTs allowed Farris to pay off her debt, and she can now pay the rent while pursuing her dreams of making art.

Mike Winkelmann (Beeple)

​​Of course, we cannot forget to mention the biggest NFT success story of all time, that of artist Mike Winkelmann, also known as Beeple. Beeple has sold two impressively priced NFTs.

First, we have Everydays: the First 5000 Days, which sold for a mind-blowing 38,525 ETH ($69,346,250). There’s also Beeple’s Crossroads, which sold for $6.6 million at Nifty Gateway.

The success stories are proof that it is indeed possible to make real money from virtual art and NFTs. It is also smart to remember that not all NFT projects are created equally and many of these artists and traders held on to their NFTs way before they obtained that price.

What makes virtual art valuable?

Not all NFT projects have become valuable overnight. Even Bored Ape Yacht Club, currently one of the most famous and highest-valued projects took a while before it became a thing.

Virtual art could be thought of as one kind of baseball cards. Baseball cards have value because people believe they have value. Humans create value: they perceive the history, rarity, and relative scarcity of an item and confer it value based on the price they are willing to pay for it.

Major brands are buying virtual art

The fact that major brands have entered the NFT world and many more are trying to understand the digital space with their artwork is a sign that virtual art is going to become more and more mainstream the more people know how it works. Formula 1, luxury brands like LVMH, Walmart, Adidas, JP Morgan.. brands of all dimensions are coming into the world of virtual art with their own interpretations of it.

Investors and major brands are willing to pay for quality virtual art that also provides them with utility. It is possible to make money from virtual art if you can market it to a specific audience willing to pay for it.

Final words about virtual art

Indie NFT projects are on the rise, too, with more than a thousand NFTs being minted on OpenSea a day and many more selling all across the different NFT marketplaces, virtual art is slowly becoming many people’s full-time job instead of a particularly quirky side gig that might one day make you money.

It really has become possible for digital artists to make a large living and even massive wealth just from virtual art. It has served as a way for artists to dedicate themselves fully to making art full-time and finance the lifestyles of their dreams.