Woman who had no money for bus ticket earns $110,000 through NFTs

From $10 in your bank, to earning $110,000 with NFTs. It happened to [Brittany Pierre]( a photographer whose life was changed by NFTs. She tells this story in an interview with [CNBC Make It](

Pierre was struggling as a photographer in Chicago. This time last year, she could barely pay the rent. Even running errands and buying bus tickets were not a given. She first learned about NFTs in March 2021, when a friend, [Elise Swopes]( sold an NFT for $15,500.

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*”It was really hard to do $50 photo shoots and try to sell 25 euro prints. I had some bookings here and there, but it wasn’t sustained,”* she tells CNBC. *”Those first few sales of about $230 were a lot for me. That’s exactly what I needed to pay the rent.”*

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**Beginnings are hard for NFTs**

If you want to create and sell an NFT, it’s a little more complicated than selling a painting on the marketplace. Because many transactions on large NFT platforms are done with Ethereum, you have to deal with gas fees. This is a fee you pay to miners who approve the transactions for these pieces of art.

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For someone who couldn’t even buy a bus ticket, these prices are way too high. Right now they are a little lower, but in 2021 these fees could reach hundreds of dollars. *”At that time I hardly had anything in my bank account. I think the cost was about $250,*” says Pierre.

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In addition, it was difficult to get into a popular market as a novice NFT artist. The most common way was to apply, or be invited. Without notoriety, this is difficult. Because of these difficulties, she was assisted by fellow artists. They helped her out by paying her first gas-fees.

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**Her art**

*”It’s mostly black women and men that I try to uplift with my art. If you search ‘beautiful person’ on Google, you usually see white people. So I wanted to put black people on the blockchain so we can solidify that. I want to highlight the black experience.”*

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Things are better for Pierre now. She now helps mostly women in the NFT community by paying their gas fees, for example, because she sees crypto and NFTs as a way to invest and make money without the traditional financial systems.

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*”I definitely think that not only NFTs, but crypto in general, can help marginalized people, especially the black community.”*

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