Building a $1M NFT Trading Business

13 Dec 2023

$1M transaction volume in 6 months. This is the story of my brief experience trading NFTs.

You can see all the trades I made in the table at the bottom of this post

I discovered Bitcoin in 2013. In 2021, I launched my first blockchain business.

Early 2021, I got interested in the Decentraland project. Its goal is to build a virtual world on the Ethereum blockchain. I believe the future of the metaverse is on the blockchain because in a virtual world, ownership is key.

In Decentraland, owning LAND grants you the rights to deploy whatever 3D creation you want inside the virtual world. The way I see this project is like a showroom for the blockchain. In its current state, blockchain is not accessible for the general public. In this early adopter stage, it is important to include users excited about the technology, regardless of technical background. Decentraland is the place for building blockchain experiences that are easier to access.

First steps

On January 19th, 2021, I deposited 1000€ on Binance. I purchased 8065 MANA (Decentraland’s own currency) which I withdrew to my Ethereum wallet. I used 8000 MANA to purchase 1 LAND on the Decentraland marketplace. Basically, I bought a piece of virtual LAND for about 1000€.

Here’s what that LAND looks like on the map:

About two months later, on March 17th, I sold that LAND for 7214 MANA. Atari had annouced an upcoming project in Decentraland which shot the value of MANA up almost 10x. Although I had lost MANA relative to my purchase price of the LAND, my stake was now worth $7,677.

LAND	Date	Event	Amount	$USD Value
-74, -48	2021-01-21	Buy	- 8,000 MANA	-$979.47
-74, -48	2021-03-17	Sell	+ 7,214 MANA	+$7,677.59

Riding the high of this lucky investment, I began to be more interested in the LAND market. I continued to buy and sell a few LAND tokens to see if I could turn a profit.

Automating

At this point I came to the understanding that all the best LAND deals were gone within minutes if not seconds. If I wanted to be first, I needed to automate. So I set up a Telegram bot that would send me notifications when LAND was listed at low prices. Unfortunately I don’t have any screenshots of that bot but basically it would send me messages like this on Telegram in real time:

⚠️ LAND BARGAIN ALERT ⚠️ 32,88 has been listed for 500 MANA

These alerts helped me pick up some LAND on the cheap.

LAND	Date	Event	Amount	$USD Value
32, 88	2021-09-06	Buy	- 500 MANA	-$520.99
-19, 23	2021-09-06	Buy	- 500 MANA	-$520.99
32, 88	2021-09-06	Sell	+ 4,872 MANA	+$5,076.65

I also built a custom trading bot for the Opensea market. This market was interesting because it was possible to place offers on LAND at no cost. Unfortunately, there was no way to make a blanket offer on all available LAND, offers needed to be created individually. What made things worst is the fluctuating value of the LAND requiring the value of offers to be re-evalutated on a daily basis. Placing offers manually, every day, on the thousands of existing LAND was not feasible. For this reason I built bot that could do it for me. This strategy proved very fruitful.

Mother Lode

The last piece of this business came when Opensea made changes to their platform that made my bot obsolete. I spotted a unique opportunity that piqued my interest. Inside Decentraland, there are casinos where people play for cryptocurrency which is worth real money. Some of these casinos have processed millions of dollars worth of bets.

In the Decentraland Discord server, I came into contact with a seller who wanted to sell a land lease for the “Flamingos Casino” that had yet to open. This “lease” would grant the holder a profit share of the revenues generated in the casino on that LAND. I checked the historical prices of these leases and one had recently sold for 22 ETH. I offered the seller 9 ETH. Initially he refused but months later he came back and sold it to me.

I immediately listed it on the market for 21 ETH and advertised the sale daily in the Discord server. Within 10 days, I pocketed 20.48 ETH after fees for more than 11 ETH profit

LAND	Date	Event	Amount	$USD Value
-129, 118	2022-03-03	Buy	- 9 ETH	-$25,503.39
-129, 118	2022-03-13	Sell	+ 20.48 ETH	+$51,532.09

Overall, within about a year, my initial investment of 1000€ had grown to be worth over $100,000 and my total transaction volume over a 6 months period was more than $1M.

Total Transaction Volume

	ETH	WETH	MANA	$USD Value
RECEIVED	149.13 ETH	0 WETH	58,782 MANA	$624,488
SPENT	9 ETH	102.47 WETH	34,851 MANA	$488,920
TOTAL	+140.13 ETH	-102.47 WETH	+23,931 MANA	+$135,568

TOTAL TRANSACTION VOLUME: $1.11M

Full Transaction List