Selling my Genome as an NFT
March 2020 seems like a lifetime ago. So much has changed in the time that has past. Before the pandemic I was travelling every month to see clients or attend and speak at conferences all over the World. Hell, in the two and half months before COVID hit, I had been to Puerto Vallarta, Maui, Honolulu, Paris, Berlin, Penang, and Kuching (Malaysia). My business was in tourism technology and like most businesses in that industry, life got very difficult. Pivoting was not something the company could do so, although I wasn’t expecting to walk away from a business I had dedicated my life to for fifteen years, I stepped down as the CEO and decided to move on to other things. If the business couldn’t pivot, at least I could.
I spent the next few months reading, a lot. I dove deep into crypto, social mechanics, and fan culture. I started experimenting with TikTok and got back on to Instagram. I played around with Shopify and other e-commerce tools to see what I had been missing all those years. The more I explored, the more opportunities I began to see. I’m an entrepreneur at heart, so I’m always looking for ways to improve things or for problems to solve. I’m also not afraid to try new things, experiment with technologies, or to take risks. I think that’s true for many entrepreneurs, it’s part of our makeup. It wasn’t long before I had convinced a few ex-travel technology friends to join me in a new startup journey.
Being ever curious, it was only natural that I should find myself exploring the world of NFTs. One morning in early March of 2021 I was walking my dog and listening to the NYT Daily podcast. The episode was about NFTs and specifically about Kevin Roose, a NYT’s reporter, and his experience creating and selling an NFT of his article. At the time, the NFT of his article had sold for $560,000 USD. That caught my attention. I began to wonder if I could use NFTs to fundraise for my startup and how novel that would be. Since part of our mission is to convert fan engagement into currency, crypto is key to our long term strategy. Finding a way to fund the startup with crypto would be a great way to prove the system works. The challenge now was figuring out what to sell as an NFT.
The problem with NFTs in their current state is that they really only support images or videos. I suppose it makes sense since it’s all about collectible digital art, trading cards, and characters; but it does limit opportunities to some degree. I had to come up with something that is unique and had never been done before and could be converted into a piece of art. Funnily enough, it was another podcast about Genomics that gave me the idea. What if I could get my genome completely sequenced and converted into an art piece. That piece of digital art would be unique because it would have a portion of my genome embedded in it. Along with the piece of art, I would also include the complete genome sequence in text form, all two million base pairs. That would be unique.
Now that I had a plan, I had to execute on it. The first step was to find a lab that could do a full genome sequencing. I found one in Europe, paid the fee and waited… and waited… and waited. Unbeknownst to me, COVID testing had begun to overwhelm many of the labs in Europe and this lab was no different. My guaranteed two week turnaround turned into ten weeks of waiting, no email responses, and general frustration. I did, however, finally get my results, so it was time to move onto step two, creating an art piece.
I had an idea of what I wanted the art piece to look like, now I had to find a digital creator who could deliver it. I contacted several artists through a number of marketplaces and finally found one that came up with something close to what I had envisioned. Next it was time to find the right marketplace to host and sell my NFT.
After a fair amount of research I settled on Opensea as the NFT marketplace I would use. Despite the higher cost of Ethereum and the higher environmental cost, I decided it was the best option for me. In order to mint the NFT I needed crypto wallet and own enough Ethereum to pay the mint and gas fees. The challenge, however, is that buying Ethereum in Canada is not as straightforward as in the U.S. Most of the wallets I tried, including Coinbase, wouldn’t allow me to purchase crypto using a credit card and, for whatever reason, didn’t have EFT capabilities with any Canadian banks. I settled on Crypto.com since it allowed me to purchase Ethereum with my credit card. Opensea, however, doesn’t support Crypto.com, so I had to transfer enough ETH from my Crypto.com account, at a cost, to my Coinbase account which was now connected to my Opensea account.
Now that the NFT is out there, what do I hope to achieve with it? Ideally, I’d like someone to buy it for a lot of ETH. After all, it is the first time a fully sequenced human genome has been available for sale in this way. That’s got to be worth something, right? But more than that, I think that NFTs have the potential to provide creators with a way to capitalize on their creations in a way that hasn’t been possible. As the technology improves and becomes simpler to use and manage, I expect more digital artists to embrace NFTs as a way of ensuring the uniqueness and to protect the copyright of their works. I hope that by taking this step, trying something new, and sharing my experience, we see more mainstream adoption of these technologies by everyday creators.
