The NFT game is all about making your NFTs look unique and noteworthy, with as much fanfare and publicity as possible. That’s because the only way to make money

The NFT game is all about making your NFTs look unique and noteworthy, with as much fanfare and publicity as possible. That’s because the only way to make money from an NFT is by flipping it to someone else, who thinks they can flip it to someone else, and so on. Having a 12-year old kid get hundreds of thousands of dollars for blockchain receipts of whales is a great way to get headlines, but I'd be cautious about taking this story at face value. The more noteworthy you can make your NFT, the more you can convince people that they might be able to make some profit by flipping it, meaning the more you can sell it for. The high prices are a known gimmick for grabbing headlines. “Useless NFT sells for $100,000” is (or was) a sure-fire way to get your NFT into the headlines. The trick was that you could actually bootstrap these high prices yourself without actually spending the money. If you have $100,000 in ETH sitting around, you didn’t have much to lose by using it to “buy” an NFT from yourself in a transaction with yourself. You keep the money, you keep the NFT, but now you’ve generated a public record of the NFT having sold for $100,000, and now you can claim to hold an extremely valuable NFT. After all, the record is on the public blockchain! No one can deny it “sold” for that high price. Maybe this kid actually lucked into a trading fad where crypto-rich individuals had so much extra money that they didn’t care about tossing hundreds of thousands of dollars to a kid in exchange for a virtual blockchain receipt for the lulz. Or maybe they think they can use these headlines to further flip the NFTs at a profit to someone else. But whenever you see a headline like this, it’s important to remember the possibility that maybe nothing actually changed hands at this price at all. If this kids’ dad (who works in finance) wanted to generate headlines hopes of flipping NFTs to someone else, what better way to do it than by getting headlines about your 12-year old making hundreds of thousands of dollars? All he needs to do is “buy” those NFTs with crypto funds, keeping the crypto funds in the family, and then start contacting news reporters about these miraculous, high value NFTs that they should totally write about in every outlet so that hopefully someone else will buy them for an even higher price. Come tax time, you can always argue that you never actually sold anything because you control both wallets, so there wasn’t any profit to be taxed. You’re only out the transaction fees, so you can buy headlines like this for tens of dollars.