The NFT World Gets Its Own Affiliate Program with NFTY Tokens

The early days of the Internet were dominated by startups backed by investors excited at the presence of a “dotcom” at the end of a word. When those companies died away, the few that remained, such as Amazon and Google, turned into colossuses that ate the rest of the Web.

Until the arrival of the affiliate program. The ability for content creators to earn a commission for delivering traffic changed everything again. Now anyone could make money on the Internet. You just needed to have information that others valued, and when you recommended a product, your trust turned into cash.

Anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit could build a business, large or small, and earn a share of the profits generated by these giant corporations. It was a revolution that democratized Internet business.

A similar revolution is now taking place in the NFT world. At the moment, there are two primary ways to make money from NFTs: mint your own collection; or buy and sell NFTs for a profit. 

Both of those approaches are relatively expensive and require a willingness to take risks. Nor do they reward people who simply want to recommend a project they like and admire to their friends and families. 

The NFTY Protocol uses the NFTY token and a stablecoin to create a reputation layer for NFT transactions. Owners stake their tokens and earn a base reward of 13.579 percent. When they use their staked tokens to promote an auction, they receive an additional share of 7.5 percent of the auction sale price in proportion to the number of tokens staked.

The process then is slightly different to the one used by affiliate sellers. There are no special links or affiliate codes, and the rewards are connected to skin in the game. The more you believe in a project, the more tokens you can stake to earn from it.

Also, token holders no longer have to promote an auction in order to earn from it. As long as people are bidding, they’ll still receive a share of the sale. It’s as though instead of being a sales rep for a product on Amazon, affiliates are Amazon investors who earn revenue from particular sales.

The aim, according to NFTY, isn’t just to enable NFT enthusiasts and entrepreneurs to make money from their recommendations. It’s primarily to create a reputation protocol, to help people to find auctions in which they’d want to participate, and to enable sellers to find the markets they deserve. It’s a way to reward people for risking their reputation on individual auctions.

But while the goal might be to match recommendations to rewards and to improve the discoverability of NFT sales, the NFTY Protocol could end up doing much more. If reputation has a value, then enthusiasts can build that value by generating an audience and demonstrating the value of their expertise. 

NFTs might still be in their early days, but they’re already giving everyone a chance to earn—just like the Internet.