A couple weeks ago my friend contacted me wanting to know everything there was to know about Bitcoin and how to get it. It turns out that the Topps trading card company had chosen the WAX blockchain to release digital versions of their
Garbage Pail Kids series cards on, and as a big collector of the physical cards he was interested in knowing a bit about how the blockchain works, how to send and receive coins and NFTs, etc.
If you didn't know, NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token... This is to designate a class of assets that cannot be broken down into smaller pieces or easily interchanged. Basically, if you own a NFT, it is yours, and nobody else owns the exact same one.
Topps is an American company that has been making sports cards since the 1950s. They started famously with baseball cards, then moved on to football, basketball, hockey, etc. In the 1980s they started their Garbage Pail Kids series which were actually stickers, but almost nobody actually peels off the sticker and they keep it as a trading card.
Here's the "face of the franchise", from series one (released in 1985):
So anyway, Topps thought it would be a good idea to release their trading cards as NFTs, starting with the Garbage Pail Kids series. They toyed with the idea of using Ethereum or EOS and then settled on WAX, which is an EOS clone that is especially geared for trading items for video games. Thought its been around for a couple years now, WAX hasn't really brought any video game publishers on board, and the Topps launch of the GPK series is by far their biggest event to date.
My friend talked my ear off about how he thought this was gonna be the next big thing in collectibles, and indeed I watched the price of WAX take off about 20% over the course of a week as all other coins were kind of declining. There are 3 main advantages of NFTs over physical collectibles:
- they are indestructible so long as the host blockchain continues to function
- they can't be forged or replicated
- they are incredibly easy to buy, sell, or trade around the world, as well as to showcase to your friends
There's also a few disadvantages:
- they aren't "real", as in the physical sense
- if you're not technologically savvy you can lose them forever
- you need to understand the basics of the blockchain to move them
From what I heard is the GPK community (yes, there is such a thing) is pretty evenly split over how they received the whole thing: some people won't touch it as they don't trust solely digital things, and some people are embracing the idea as collectors, thinking it is worth getting in to. They all have one thing in common: they don't know how to buy WAX.
The first sales of card "packs" (5 cards to a small pack and 30 cards to a big pack) sold out in about 28 hours, and you could buy the packs using a debit card or PayPal, so that was no problem. For those who missed the boat, they have to learn how to buy WAX, and though its a real hassle for some of them, this use of NFTs is definitely encouraging a whole new breed of people to learn about crypto.
Rumor has it that, after the next series of GPK cards is released in June, Topps will move on to releasing Star Wars cards (which they own the rights to), and then sports cards. I'm personally thinking this could propel WAX much higher in the future, so long as a steady influx of interest is maintained.
As a reference point, the price of WAX is currently
$0.0464. You can check out how much cards are currently selling for
here. Some cards are already going for several hundred dollars, its a bit nuts.
There's a lot more to talk about but hopefully this thread will spark discussion on whether or not digital collectibles in the form of NFTs has a future. Currently, the market says "yes," but in the long run, things remain relatively uncertain.