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You can sell anything on the Internet, even an old tweet.
Even tweets. Twitter boss Jack Dorsey recently auctioned off his first tweet from 2006. A veritable relic of the Internet with the highest bid currently standing at $ 2.5 million. In what world can you sell a tweet? In that of blockchain and cryptocurrencies.
And more precisely in the country of NFTs, for non-fungible tokens. These digital tokens, mainly based on the Ethereum blockchain, have their own character and are not interchangeable, unlike a bitcoin which can be exchanged for another bitcoin.
In recent months, the population of NFTs has grown significantly, digitizing works of art, playing cards, luxury bags, pieces of music … To be part of this young crypto nation and in turn sell NFTs, here is a little beginner’s guide, which the I tested myself. Yes, I wanted to sell the article you are reading as an NFT.
Create a crypto address
To buy or sell bitcoin, you must first have a bitcoin address. It’s the same for NFTs, except that you need an Ethereum address. To do this, you just have to download a wallet (there are lots of them on the market) which allows you to send and receive cryptocurrency. I use OKEx or Binance, which can be found on app stores and exists as a browser extension. It is often integrated into NFT platforms and thus allows one-click identification. This wallet will allow you to receive the fruits of your future sale of NFT.
Find the right platform
Jack Dorsey went through Valuables, a platform specializing in the purchase and sale of NFT tweets. So if you want to follow in Jack’s footsteps, go to the site. Log in through your Twitter or Metamask account, submit your tweet and you’re good to go. If you are an artist and want to sell a work, the historical platform is called SuperRare.
Warning: this is not Leboncoin of digital art. Curators agree or not to list your creation on the platform. “They know digital art very well, recognize whether a work is innovative or not and see if you are popular on Twitter, the most used social network in the sector”, explains Hugo Caselles-Dupré, founder of the Obvious collective., specializing in the creation of works of art based on algorithms. Once you are accepted as an artist, you can list whatever you want.
Artists will find what they are looking for on the historic SuperRare platform
The other big art platform is Nifty Gateway, which is currently recording sales records with the artist Beeple in particular. If you wish to sell other “objects” in the form of an NFT, the OpenSea and Rarible platforms are very easy to use, without curation, and no need to know how to code. All you have to do is go to the “create” tab, connect your wallet and follow the instructions. I chose OpenSea. Within seconds, we were able to create a collection into which we loaded our article.
Take costs into account
Let’s talk about money. The good news, NFT platforms don’t charge fees. But creating and selling an NFT still comes at a cost. You have to pay the transaction fees made on the Ethereum blockchain when you “mine” your NFT (in everyday language, when you transform it) and when you sell it. These fees vary daily ( here’s where to track them ). And right now, they’re particularly expensive, around $ 110 per transaction. So no need to sell an NFT below that price.
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Platforms not based on Ethereum but on another blockchain, Tezos, have emerged. On Reddit, a user minted his NFT on the Hic et nunc marketplace, which cost him 8 cents. In addition to being less expensive, Tezos-based platforms are less energy-intensive. “Many artists are very sensitive to their environmental impact”, emphasizes Hugo Caselles-Dupré. Welcome to the “NFT green” region.
Self-promote
Blockchain is not magic. It is not going to allow you to sell your NFT in seconds for a million dollars. It is imperative to communicate. Thoroughly. “You have to be present on various social networks to make yourself known. Currently, with the world there is, it’s more complicated,” said Quentin de Beauchesne, founder of the French community CryptoFr. On OpenSea alone, there are now 142,000 NFTs. “Get into the communities, talk to people who are influential and who interest you, they are often very open people,” experts advise.
Don’t forget to declare your sales
We kept the least funny point for the end: taxation. When you are a company or an artist, your turnover will be equal to the value (in euros, dollars…) of the ethers at the time of payment. If you decide to convert your ethers later, the price must be taken into account at the time of the transfer (and not when payment has been made). It is then up to you to take into account the amount in corporation tax or non-commercial profits (BNC). Note that artists must apply VAT at 10% and not at 5.5% (for “classic” works of art). “They cannot benefit from the 5.5% rate specific to artists because a digital work does not fall within the definition of a work of art”, a tax lawyer.
If you are an individual, the question is more complex. Because NFTs do not fall within the legal definition of digital assets. It is necessary to consider an NFT as movable property and therefore to apply the regime of capital gains on the movable property (sales of less than 5,000 euros are exempt). If you still decide to consider NFT as a digital asset, since it involves ether, you are exempt from taxes, crypto to crypto transactions being exempt.