Childhood friends made half a million pounds overnight by selling their drawings as NFTs
“I won’t say how many hours it’s taken, but we’re talking thousands.”
Ashley Crossland has been working on a project in the evenings and weekends since March 2021, and it’s finally starting to pay off. Alongside school mate Jimmi Sandham, he has been riding the wave of NFTs – online collectibles which, if done right, can sell for thousands of pounds.
That is exactly what has happened. Ashley and Jimmy’s collection of digital images of anthropomorphic stags, Stag Alliance, was sold in March, netting them £450,000 almost overnight. Ashley, now based in Cardigan, Ceredigion after moving from England to attend Cardiff University, has put in the work behind the scenes to make this happen.
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“My current job is as a director at a design agency,” Ashley said. “I’ve been doing all the work in the evenings and weekends and it’s been a challenge as I have a family, with a wife and a young son, but everyone has been very supportive and helped me push through.”
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are a somewhat controversial field, and quite difficult to explain. They’re a bit like digital trading cards – they can go up and down in value, and people buy and sell them with the aim of getting the most sought after – but they don’t actually exist in physical form.
Instead, they exist on the blockchain, a kind of digital database that certifies who owns what and cannot be edited by the seller. Still confused?
“I see NFTs as a modern future way of fundraising,” Ashley explained. “You’ve had collectibles since the beginning of time. People collect rocks, stamps, Pokemon cards, all these kinds of things. All NFTs are a future way of collecting, that’s the way we approach it.”
It’s hard to imagine owning a digital image when it can be screenshotted or downloaded by anyone who likes the look of it, and when owning an NFT doesn’t actually give you the copyright to the image. But, Ashley said, “if you go to an art gallery and buy a poster of the Mona Lisa from the gift shop, that doesn’t mean you suddenly own the Mona Lisa because it’s just an original copy, and by the same token, it’s just a [of each NFT] on the blockchain.”
If you’re surprised that people want to buy NFTs, you might be more surprised to hear that some of the Stag Alliance collection sold for an average of £63 each, for a total of around £450,000, and that some of them have since sold further for up to the equivalent of £6,500 in the cryptocurrency ADA.
In other words, business is going very good for Ashley and Jimmi. Ashley took us back to the beginning of the story: “I’m a graphic designer, print and web designer, and I hadn’t illustrated much, but I always had a passion for it and had been doing it in the evenings, for fun, like a way to relax.
What is an NFT?
Britannica says: “An NFT (non-fungible token) is a digital asset that has been authenticated using blockchain technology. Digital assets are intangible objects that live on the Internet, including videos, GIFs, images and collages. NFT- are not allowing their creators. only to “sign” digital assets, but also to monetize them, often selling them on digital marketplaces using digital wallets containing cryptocurrency.”
“Then I drew more and looked at more NFTs, bought and sold them on this Cardano blockchain, and I realized that I had the skills to do this and the passion to try it. I invited one of my long-term friends to come and help me, and it just grew and grew from there.”
From that point until the big sale in March, thousands of hours of work went into the project—many of them Jimmi’s as well as Ashley’s. The pair met in year 7 and were friends at school, but only started working together years later on a few projects here and there, with Ashley as a director of a design agency and Jimmi as a copywriter.
Jimmi told WalesOnline: “We’ve known each other for many years now and it would have been a little over a year since he told me about this. The community wanted some knowledge, some sort of background to the project, in this case about deer that magically have been transformed into humanoid form.
“I started writing the story and we published the first part, it went really well, so some time passed and Ashley asked me for another one. At that point the project was clearly accelerating extremely quickly and we partnered up so we could run the project in a structured manner.”
To explain where Jimmi fits in, it’s important to understand one of the great controversies surrounding NFTs – the fact that many digital collectibles are marketed as an investment with a chance of resale value, when in reality several of the big projects have failed to deliver on this.
However, Ashley is keen to point out that Stag Alliance is not marketed as an investment. Ashley emphasized “We never sold them to tell people it was going to make them money.
“Some people want that to happen, and it would be great for us to give it to people, but we’re selling it as a collector’s item. We’re not focused on people making financial gains, and we don’t recommend it.”
But a collectible must be worth collecting. Ashley compares franchises like Pokemon or Harry Potter where you might buy a piece of merchandise for its own sake rather than its financial value, but that’s because those franchises are giants of pop culture in their own right.
For Stag Alliance to work, there has to be a whole fantasy world of narratives, characters and iconography designed around the NFT collectibles, and people have to want a part of it – so a huge amount of work is required to reel them in, and that is where Jimmi comes in.
Jimmi said ambitiously: “With these collectibles you have to create demand and our method of doing that is to create a fantasy world that people love to immerse themselves in.
“We have three main pillars: the novels, a gamified website where community members can collect resources, create items and get involved in role-playing, and the community. Our plan is to create a fantasy world and the endgame is to create an also- known as the Marvel universe, Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings.
“Obviously it takes a long, long time, so our next goal by the end of this year is to have published fantasy novels that can bring in audiences from places other than the NFT fundraising communities.
After months of build-up, the day in March when the collectibles went on sale was a big one for the two friends, and Ashley freely admits he didn’t get much sleep. “The sale was a 24 to 48 hour process,” he said, “and pretty surreal at the time.”
You know the rest – the pair have been racking up work hours in a very big way. But now it’s about keeping the success alive.
“It’s been really busy since then,” Ashley said, “because when you sell them, it’s not over — you have thousands of people who have bought your work, and suddenly you have a huge community that wants you to deliver. I have taken a moment to celebrate the success, but then it’s right back to continuing to deliver for the people who have bought your work.”
Does it stress him out? “No, it motivates me. It gives more responsibility because some people see the industry as the wild west of crypto, a lot of projects can’t deliver, close shop and make people upset and disappointed.
“We’re trying to be a project people can look up to and trust. We’re doing everything right, to set an example for other projects that come up.”
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