After kicking the idea around for a while I finally went and created my own token! Yesterday I signed up/in on lensy.io and got whitelisted, which was far more painless and trouble free than I had expected. Setting up keychain and adding a portfolio to my website was about the only things I had to do aside from filling out the profile/form (and I should have done that long ago anyway) and clicking the button to apply.
Creating this token (and this post) are something in the nature of an experiment. I love the idea of NFTs but I'm not certain how well or how quickly they will catch on. Browsing Lensy and NFTshowroom (the related one for art) you can see what has sold recently under the 'Activity' tab. Looking through NFTshowroom, I was pleasantly surprised by the level of activity, Lensy was more of a cause for concern.
Part of why I'm writing this is to see if I can help to remedy that. To that end I created five tokens of the image above and priced them at 10 HIVE each. I hate pricing things but that was a nice round number for an experiment. So, does anybody want to add this cute little critter (he's begging you to!) to their digital collection? If so, here is where to go: https://lensy.io/gallery/coloneljethro_colonels-critters_beggar-bandit . Not only does it help me out(this pandemic has been hell on the pocketbook), it also makes hive just a little bit better too :)
I suspect more than a few people are watching from the sidelines, waiting to see what happens with NFTs before they join in. I'm hoping that more visibility and activity will help speed up the process. As I was writing this a couple thoughts occurred to me, first is that the liquid rewards from this post will be used to purchase NFTs on one of the two platforms mentioned previously and secondly creating some sort of 'Digital Art Sweepstakes' . With the second one I'm unsure whether to create a new account for it or just do a regular, recurring post but my thought was use post rewards to purchase NFTs to be given away to those that voted on the post (other eligibility requirements may be needed but I'm coming up with this as I type). This way nobody has to spend any of their hard earned HIVE, it supports creators and artists on the blockchain, and it helps build visibility and acceptance of NFTs. This is something of a coffee and cigarettes brainstorm that I just had, let me know what y'all think (or if someone else is already doing this).