My Introduction to NFTs: From Mortgage Software to Virtual Cats
It was a normal day at the large mortgage company where I was building hedging software for our Capital Markets division. Using VueJS and .Net, I was knee-deep in code, integrating Bloomberg APIs, processing Treasury bonds, and making sure our system worked in real-time with all the bells and whistles like Signal R. This project was one of my greatest professional achievements. Our team was handling serious capital markets functions, moving millions of dollars with precision. And I was proud of the complexity and sophistication of what we were building.
At the time, I wanted to attend the Cypress conference in Toronto. It was a technical gathering, the kind of event where you expect serious talks and presentations about code, systems, and frameworks. But as I sat in the audience, something unexpected happened. The keynote speaker—a woman dressed in a costume that made her look like a car—stepped onto the stage. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Here was someone dressed like it was Halloween, giving the keynote presentation at a tech conference. It was so out of place in the world I knew. But the real shock came when she introduced Dapper Labs and Cryptokitties.
Now, I was familiar with cryptocurrencies, but Cryptokitties? Virtual cats with digital DNA you could breed, each one stored on the blockchain? It seemed surreal. These weren’t just any virtual pets either. Individual Cryptokitties had sold for more than $300,000 each. At the time, the average price for one was about $65.76, and Dapper Labs had already raised $250 million with a valuation of $2 billion. This absolutely blew my mind.
Here I was, building complex software for banks, processing high-stakes financial transactions, and these people were selling virtual cats for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The sheer amount of money being spent on something with no tangible value shocked me. Yet, the power of NFTs was undeniable. People were willing to spend real money, and lots of it, on unique digital assets. That’s when the concept clicked for me: NFTs could unlock value in unexpected places.
This moment sparked an idea that would eventually become one of my most exciting ventures. While Cryptokitties were fun, I started to think about the real-world applications of tokenizing assets. My mind turned to Zambia, where my Uncle Teddy Namainga was the largest cattle rancher with over 5,000 head of cattle. Like many Zambian farmers, he couldn’t get credit for his cattle. The traditional banking system simply didn’t cater to him or other ranchers. Instead, farmers had to turn to loan sharks, paying as much as 50% interest. The system was broken, and NFTs seemed like a potential solution.
This is when the idea for Cryptocows was born. Why not tokenize cattle in Zambia? Farmers could use their cattle as collateral, creating liquidity in a market that desperately needed it. Tokenizing these assets could provide a decentralized, efficient way for farmers to access the capital they deserved, all without the exploitative interest rates of loan sharks. NFTs could bring real value to communities that had been left out of the traditional financial system.
And so, from virtual cats to real cows, my journey with NFTs began. What started as a shock quickly evolved into an exciting vision: using blockchain technology not just for novelty, but for real-world impact. The future of decentralized finance and digital assets had arrived, and I was ready to dive in.
