These Gabb Wireless employees founded an NFT company: They work their day jobs--and now their side hustle--together.

• Author: Alsever, Jennifer

IN 2021, Brad Dowdle came down with COVID and his wife immediately "banished" him to quarantine in the basement. Flush with fever for a week, the Gabb Wireless executive watched endless YouTube videos on non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency. After a vivid, feverish dream, he came up with an idea for a startup.

After testing negative for the virus, Dowdle walked into work and told his fellow Gabb Wireless colleagues Greg Lewandowski, A. Todd Smith, and Josh Ruggles about his dream. Within three months, they built Fever Dream Friends, a new startup dedicated to creating NFTs about dreaming big. Each NFT contains the collectible digital artwork and exclusive access to future NFT drops, Fever Dream events (such as a private party at Meow Wolf in Las Vegas), and access to special product drops from partner brands.

While real-life fever dreams tend to be vivid and bizarre, Dowdle's COVID fever dream wasn't exactly irrational. Creating an NFT is one of the hottest things to do in the tech space and one of the more profitable--for now, at least.

An NFT is a token that represents a unique asset--whether it's a digital work, a virtual land, domain name, or equipment in a video game that is stored and circulated virtually on a blockchain--and Dowdle's basement research noted that trading NFTs was on an upward trajectory. In 2021, trading grew 21,000 percent to $17 billion. During the first quarter of this year, trading grew 13 percent to hit $7.8 billion, according to a report by Nonfungible.com. The activity indicates a decline in trades but an 80 percent jump in the price of NFTs between Q4 2021 and Q1 2022.

Most of that activity was in collectibles, which accounted for 80 percent of the trades, and were fanned by soaring prices of NFTs like Invisible Friends, CloneX, Azuki, and CyberBrokers. NFT markets recorded the most profitable sale in history with more than $23 million on the resale of a single asset, CryptoPunk #5822, which resold after more than four years.

Bored Ape Yacht Club--an NFT collection of 20,000 sailor-style apes--could dethrone CryptoPunks as the most active project at the end of 2021, according to Nonfungible.com. Bored Ape ranked first, surpassing CryptoPunks with more than $1.2 billion traded in the first quarter. Last year, Silicon Valley heavyweight Andreesen Horowitz established a $2.2 billion fund to invest in crypto.

NFTs suddenly offered the perfect way to crowdfund a startup versus appealing to investors for...