Non-fungible tokens (NFT) are a fast-growing business. “NFT art is digital artwork that is backed by a blockchain technology,” such as Ethereum or Polygon.

Creating NFTs is a lot of work, a lot of heavy lifting. In addition to the art, you’re building a community around the art, and then maintaining that community. Many fail at it. Most fail at it.

Kanpai Pandas is a recent example of success (I own no Kanpai Pandas). They built a 10,000 piece collection, sold out, and went to work developing the community.

Now, because this is the blockchain, the holders of Kanpai Pandas are a public record.

It is a lot easier, faster, cheaper and straightforward to plug into an existing NFT community than to try to build and maintain your own, at least in my little world of reason. You give yourself a better chance at success. So you find NFT collections where the copyright protections are favorable – in other words, for example, if you own some of those 10,000 NFTs, you can work those into your own creations – and partner with artists and writers to build unique creations like comic books that work your owned characters into the story.

And then you give those creations back to the holders of the original art, or sell them. In the world of blockchain, you already know who holds the original art, and so it is very easy to mass distribute what you created. Theoretically, it raises the value of the original art because they’re getting something additional for holding the original art, and what you created will generate value, too, as people discover what they received.

I’ve already seen this work, but I think it’s still an underutilized technique for getting into the NFT business cheaply with relatively low risk. There should be a lot more derivative works than there are presently.