These Gabb Wireless employees founded an NFT company

In 2021, Brad Dowdle came down with Covid and his wife “banished” him immediately to quarantine in the basement. Rinse with fever for a week, it Gabb wireless executives watched endless YouTube videos on non-fungible tokens (NFT) and cryptocurrencies. After a lively, feverish dream, he came up with an idea for a start-up.

After testing negative for the virus, Dowdle went to work and told Gabb Wireless colleagues Greg Lewandowski, A. Todd Smithand Josh Ruggles about his dream. Within three months, they built Fever Dream Friends, a new startup dedicated to creating NFTs about dreaming big. Each NFT contains the collectible digital artwork and exclusive access to future NFT drops, Fever Dream events (like a private party at Meow Wolf in Las Vegas), and access to special product drops from partner brands.

While real fever dreams tend to be vivid and bizarre, Dowdle’s Covid fever dream was not exactly irrational. Creating an NFT is one of the hottest things to do in the technology field and one of the most profitable – for now, at least.

An NFT is a symbol that represents a unique resource – whether it is a digital work, a virtual country, domain name or equipment in a video game that is stored and circulated virtually on a blockchain – and Dowdle’s basement survey noted that trading in NFTs was on a path upwards. In 2021, trade grew by 21,000 percent to $ 17 billion. During the first quarter of this year, trade grew by 13 percent to $ 7.8 billion, according to a report by Nonfungible.com. Activity indicates a decline in trades, but an 80 percent jump in the price of NFTs between Q4 2021 and Q1 2022.

Most of this activity was in collectibles, which accounted for 80 percent of trades, and was encouraged by sky-high prices on NFTs such as Invisible Friends, CloneX, Azuki and CyberBrokers. NFT markets recorded the most profitable sale in history with more than $ 23 million on the resale of a single asset, CryptoPunk # 5822, which was resold after more than four years.

Bored Ape Yacht Club– an NFT collection of 20,000 sailor-style monkeys – could dethrone CryptoPunks as the most active project by the end of 2021, according to Nonfungible.com. Bored Ape ranked first, surpassing CryptoPunks with more than $ 1.2 billion in revenue in the first quarter. Last year, Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreesen Horowitz arrived established a $ 2.2 billion fund to invest in crypto.