How to Appraise NFTs on Upshot
Dear Bankless Nation,
Accurate NFT appraisals are going to be hugely in demand going forward, yet the ecosystem’s appraisal scene is admittedly nascent for now.
One project notably stepping up to the plate to advance this sector is Upshot, an up-and-coming NFT appraisal platform.
This week Upshot kicked off its Open Beta program, meaning anyone can now try out the platform and earn tokens for appraising NFTs!
To give us the inside scoop, Upshot CEO Nick Emmons wrote up a primer (which I’ve shared below) for Metaversal readers on how the new platform works and how you can start using it. Enjoy, and happy appraisings 💎
-WMP
Get Paid to Appraise on Upshot
Guest Writer: Nick Emmons, CEO of Upshot
What’s Upshot?
Upshot is a platform for crowdsourced NFT appraisals. A decentralized community of collectors interact with Upshot to deliver quick and accurate pricing of assets through what we call appraisal games.
In this way, Upshot aims to provide real-time price feeds for NFTs through crowdsourced appraisals, unlocking opportunities for a new generation of appraisers and catalyzing powerful new innovations in DeFi. The ultimate goal? To create a kind of “Zestimate” for any NFT, while paying experts for being honest.
Accordingly, Upshot will be a collector-centric NFT platform that gives NFT collectors unique opportunities to capture value from their expertise. Answering questions on Upshot is simple, addicting, and gas-free, and it offers people an opportunity to actually work for a protocol.
What makes Upshot special?
NFTs are both non-fungible and low-velocity (they don’t change hands very often). This makes them very difficult to price. If an NFT only changes hands once every six months, how do you know how much you should pay for it? How do you know how much you should sell it for?
That said, many of the obstacles halting a mass-embrace of NFTs stems from the lack of reliable NFT price discovery mechanisms.
To support the growing and diverse NFT market, we will need scalable pricing infrastructure, and that’s where Upshot comes in. Being able to efficiently price NFTs will knock down existing barriers to adoption and enable a wave of powerful, new financial products built on top of this burgeoning asset class.
Toward this end, Upshot leverages a new field of mechanism design called peer prediction to incentivize people to answer subjective questions honestly. Peer prediction works by analyzing the correlation between answers and gleaning insights into what honesty looks like from those correlations. People answering questions maximize their reward when they answer questions honestly.
How to use Upshot
Interested in getting paid to appraise NFTs on Upshot? Get started by following these simple steps.
Head to Upshot.io and click the “Use Upshot” button at the top right of the screen.
Next, you’ll be prompted to connect your wallet.
After you connect your wallet, choose a group whose NFTs you’d like to appraise.
It’s time to start appraising. You’ll be presented with questions and it’s your job to answer them honestly. Best part: you just have to sign messages with your answers — no gas required! 🙂
If you don’t feel confident about an answer or just want to skip the question, no worries! You can skip questions without any penalty.
If you need more information before providing an honest appraisal, be sure to check out the page with details for that specific NFT. You can navigate to it on the back of the card in the NFT view.
If you’d like to appraise NFTs in other groups, click the group icon in the header next to your profile picture. This will bring you to a page with an extensive list of the groups currently on Upshot.
Every week, payments will be sent out to appraisers of each group based on how honest they were and how much money is available. As an appraiser, you can find this info, claim your rewards, and see other useful metrics either on the group page or for all groups in your user profile. Right now, appraisers receive both USDC and UPT, Upshot’s native token, for their appraisals. UPT is only usable within Upshot — it’s used to request appraisals of specific NFTs, unlock special appraiser rewards and more.
Another thing you can do on Upshot is fund groups. Funding creates “fuel” for groups in the form of yield. This is the primary source of money to pay appraisers. When someone funds a group, their staked capital is invested in different interest-earning protocols on-chain, such as Compound. At any point, a funder can withdraw the amount they originally deposited. So, you can think of funding groups as closer to just donating your yield.
People who fund groups will earn UPT based on how much of the group’s funding they’ve provided and for how long. Claiming the UPT you’ve earned can be done from the group list page or from the about section of a specific group.
One perk of UPT is that it gives you some influence over what NFTs are appraised in a group. You can see all of the NFTs eligible for appraisals in a group’s “registry.” When requesting an appraisal for an NFT, you’re also asked what you believe the price of the NFT is as a starting point for appraisals.
That’s all it takes to get started appraising NFTs on Upshot, so come give it a try now that the platform’s Open Beta is live! It’s fun, worthwhile, and productive for the ecosystem all at once.
Action steps
- 👀 Go connect your wallet on Upshot and appraise your first NFTs.
Author Bio
Nick Emmons is co-founder and CEO at Upshot — a platform for crowdsourced NFT appraisals. He previously led blockchain engineering at John Hancock and Manulife, where he started one of the first public blockchain projects to come from a large institution.