Gifting NFTs for the Holidays – Can NFT Gifts Help Broaden the Market for NFTs?

How many people are going to gift/receive NFTs this holiday season? Undoubtedly more than last year. Apparently, Tom Brady is doing so and Bloomberg felt the need to report it… it’s a funny time we’re living in, no?

Anyways, I imagine that there will be a significant amount of NFT gifting this holiday between NFT collectors. After all, gifting NFTs is easier than ordering something from Amazon and wrapping the present. Not to mention, it’s a pleasant surprise to open your wallet and see a new NFT in there. It’s going to happen a lot this year.

What interests me more, though, is whether people who’ve never owned or experienced NFTs will have the chance to get an NFT gift this holiday.

The Challenge of Gifting NFTs

Wouldn’t it feel good to gift an NFT to that person in your family or circle of friends that have shown a lot of curiosity toward digital assets, but hasn’t bit the bullet yet? Better yet, wouldn’t it feel great to gift an NFT to that person who is always bashing NFTs and anything crypto-related?! (Of course, that is if you’re into spiteful, tongue-in-cheek kinds of gifts.)

Anyways, I scoured the web to find a way to give an NFT as a present to someone who doesn’t have a blockchain wallet set up yet. And obviously, there isn’t a resource for it because that would require gifting a blockchain wallet as well, which is kind of a no-no for security reasons.

Still, there are a few ways that you can gift cryptocurrency to people who don’t have wallets, which might be applicable to NFT gifts.

For example, you can generate a paper wallet which prints the public and private key on a piece of paper with the funds already transferred to that wallet. These have mostly been phased out in favor of hardware wallets, as it’s much more secure to gift a flash drive to someone than it is a piece of paper. But I think that would further complicate things for someone who's never used crypto, let alone bought an NFT.

Of course, if you were a trustworthy person, you could create a new MetaMask wallet on behalf of the giftee, send the NFT to that wallet, and then gift all the wallet credentials… Honestly, from my searches, it’s probably the only way to gift an NFT to someone new this holiday.

Overall, none of the above options are sexy.

Gifting NFT Wallets

There’s a real opportunity here to create a service that makes it simple for gifting the NFT experience to someone new. Said service would have to reserve the wallet for that person, hold the NFT in an escrow, and then make a secure on-boarding experience for the person receiving the gift. Most importantly, this service would have to make the entire gifting experience flashy, fun, and gift-worthy. Make it impressive for the receivers so that they’re compelled to want to keep going in the crypto/NFT world.

The bottom-line for blockchain (NFT) wallets is user growth. MetaMask, WalletConnect, Fortmatic, etc. want more people to have wallets.

Creating an all-in-one secure way to gift a blockchain wallet (with pre-loaded NFT gifts) should be a priority for wallet providers. I think it’s a real opportunity for growth in both the crypto and NFT world.

Coinbase understands how to make crypto investing easy for newbies. And now that they’re getting into NFTs, other blockchain wallets that specifically serve the NFT market should be worried. They need to level up their game.

Ultimately, a lot of people are fearful of NFTs for a variety of reasons. Maybe they don’t understand the idea of scarce digital assets. Maybe they don’t like the volatility. Maybe they just don’t care. But experience is the best teacher. Especially if that experience costs nothing to the receiver.

Gifting the NFT experience should be a top priority for the various providers in the NFT world. It’s a great way to expand the NFT market and broaden the appeal of this revolutionary technology. I hope to see it come to life very soon.