'Our account had less than $1': This couple made nearly $120,000 in under 6 hours selling NFTs to save their home from foreclosure. (via CNBCMakeIt)
After Thorne Melcher lost her job as a software engineer in February, bills started piling up. Her girlfriend, Mandy Musselwhite, was able to cover a few expenses selling her artwork, but the couple quickly fell behind on their mortgage payments.
Although the couple wasn't already known in the NFT space, a small group of supporters helped generate interest in the project. As a coder, Melcher was able to quickly learn Solidity, a programming language for developing smart contracts that run on the Ethereum blockchain, with the help of a few mentors in the space. Musselwhite, a graphic artist, designed each Dastardly Duck.Prior to the collection's release, the couple received criticism online regarding the potential impact of NFTs on the environment, as the process of creating them can require a lot of computer power.
"Trans Duck" from the Dastardly Ducks NFT collection that Thorne Melcher and Mandy Musselwhite co-created.To code the smart contract this way, Melcher had help from another popular NFT collection called Azuki, she says. Melcher was able to iterate on their whitepaper to create the code for Dastardly Ducks. "In order to solve environmental problems, we cannot pretend new technological innovations will go away," she says.