In this article, I share my experience with a new NFT marketplace called Fantasea.io. There is not much information available about it online. The domain was registered just over a month ago, and the website currently feels like a work in progress. Because more and more photographers seem to be being contacted to sell NFTs on this site, it is important to determine if it is legal.
How I learned about Fantasea.io
I am not in the NFT business and primarily sell my images as prints or license them through my website. Two weeks ago someone contacted me who was interested in buying four of my pictures. At first it appeared that he wanted to license the images for some exclusive use.
But after some back and forth I found out that he was interested in buying these pictures as NFTs. And he didn’t flinch when I suggested a price of 2 ETH per image – more than $3000. I offered to create (create) them on OpenSea, a well-established marketplace. He didn’t like that site and suggested using a new NFT marketplace called Fantasea.io.
I have now learned that the story is a common one. I know of three other photographers who had a similar interaction with other “buyers” who wanted them to sell their photos as NFTs via Fantasea.io.
Scam or legit?
As usual in the crypto space, be careful when there is “easy” money to be made. To be honest, I enjoyed the opportunity to make more than $12,000 from four of my photos. But I was careful with Fantasea.io. When I first explored the site, it revealed several errors. It also only contains vague information and does not yet comply with the General Data Protection Regulation.
One could say that it is a very new marketplace and there may be advantages to being an early adopter. The problem with Fantasea.io is that minting an NFT costs around $250. And it’s not even a fully automated process where you connect to a wallet like MetaMask and use it for funding.
Without getting too technical here: to create an NFT on Fantasea.io, you need to send the required fee to a wallet provided by Fantasea.io after registration.
Remember that the “buyer” wanted me to emboss four images. It would cost me $1000. I estimated my chances of this being a legitimate request very low and I definitely wouldn’t spend $1000 on such a game.
By then I had decided to write an article about this experience, and I needed a little more proof. So I asked the “buyer” if we could start with just one picture, since I was short on money. I would later use the profits to mint the other NFTs. He agreed.
Since I still had some funds from writing articles on my hive.blog, I used them to create one image. It solidified my impression of Fantasea.io and the “buyer”. He began to stop soon after, writing that he was still preparing the funds and talking a little.
The beauty of cryptocurrencies is: you can track the money using tools like Etherscan. So I checked the transactions on the wallet address I had sent the money to. As soon as my money was received, it was already sent to another wallet and from there to Binance.
Now I know I am not the only one who has been contacted in this way. Since I have one of the few accounts on Fantasea.io, other photographers contacted me about my experience with this marketplace. Like me, they were also in contact with potential “buyers”.
Conclusion
To me, this whole interaction didn’t feel right from the first time I checked Fantasea.io. But I wanted safety and I look at the $250 I spent as an investment in this article. If you found it on Google after having a similar interaction that I had, you can now better decide whether you want to gamble your money. Also, use block explorer tools like Etherscan to check the wallet where your money goes to suspicious activities.
And in case you’re wondering why I didn’t include proper links to Fantasea: I didn’t want to increase their SEO. And who knows, maybe there will be a marketplace under a new domain soon with a similar “buyers” fan base. So watch out.
