Jesus Calderon is a 29-year-old watch geek and crypto evangelist that's making a lot of cash by creating and selling watch NFTs. His collection is called Generative Watches and it currently consists of two main lines, the Rødex Daitona and Rødex Bitmariner, obviously inspired by the Rolex Daytona and Submariner.
Hodinkee, arguably the most influential watch magazine in the world, recently interviewed Calderon and they say he gets paid in "an abstracted form of currency". They mean Ethereum, which is the currency you use on OpenSea.
It sounds crazy, and it is, but this is just the start. Not that long ago, a digital artist made a lot of noise when she released a collection of NFTs representing Hermès Birkin bags without Hermès' permission. I'm assuming there's going to be a lawsuit at some point and it may set an interesting precedent.
As for Calderon, he's safe because he hasn't used any trademarked names, so he's basically just creating homage watches in digital form. In the interview, Calderon describes an NFT as a "digital signature", and he says he spent months generating the algorithm on which all watches are built. Hence the name "Generative".
So far he's sold 68 NFTs for around 0.2 ETH, the price of ETH varies significantly on a daily basis but Calderon says at the end of the day he made around around $700 per watch.
The truth is that an NFT is basically just a piece of code that can't be altered or corrupted. For the most part, so far, we've seen NFTs that represent digital art but that's just because you add a jpeg image to the piece of code. You can add anything including, and I think this is going to be important factor in the future, documents.
Kevin O'Leary (Shark Tank), an investor an avid watch collector, says he wants to use NFTs as digital documents to authenticate some of his rarest watches. The idea is that sometimes you buy a watch and you have to have it authenticated, which is costly and tiresome, whereas it would be instant and 100% secure and accurate if the authentication were made through an NFT.
I've crossposted this article on DT, my blog bitcoinea and LeoFinance
