Once I learned that it was virtually pointless to make .01Ξ loan offers I began to increase my offer amounts. Since then I have made dozens of offers on all sorts of names (mostly bad looking ones) for amounts anywhere from .1Ξ to .4Ξ ($184 – $736 at the time of this writing).
Even though I didn’t love the names I saw, I just wanted to get some loans going to see how they play out. Unfortunately, none of the offers were accepted, which is disappointing. I am not sure if it’s because the prospective borrowers aren’t seeing the offers or if because they don’t like the terms. They just expire in silence.
A long time ago, online peer-to-peer lenders LendingClub and Prosper had a solution to this frustrating bottleneck, they would approve the terms of the loans themselves and then lenders could simply choose to accept them or not. When the total approved loan amount was raised, the loan was executed.
Platforms like Arcade can do something like this already. They just started listing ENS names again. Loans that are all ready to go on Arcade as soon as a lender accepts the terms are categorized as “has terms set.” That’s cool except the three in that category currently have loan terms set between 2Ξ and 5Ξ (From $3,600 to $9,200 at the time of this writing) against names that I would consider to be worth $20 on a generous day. The names were freshly registered for $5 each as well, for example.
Which brings me to another topic altogether, the strange delusions that people have about the value of what they have. Obviously I think web3 names can have value, even significant value, but many valuations are purely exaggerated. Since I started posting about NFT lending on X recently, name sellers have been storming my DMs to offer me all sorts of terrible names for wild prices of $10,000 to $20,000 and even higher.
I’m not really a buyer. My interest is in lending to earn… interest. If I’m going to get stuck with a name in a default, I’d like to have some kind of plan to monetize it beyond becoming a DM spammer begging people for eth in exchange for some terrible name. There is a play here on how to do that I just haven’t 100% fully formulated it yet. .eth names can be web pages on one hand and social media usernames on the other. I’m sean3.eth on farcaster. Some people may tell me to focus on a category with liquidity like numerical string names (aka digits) or something, but the financial value and tradability of those things is just a fad. The value is in how it can be monetized by an end user, not how it can just be quickly pawned off to some other sucker who also doesn’t know what to do with it who will then try to sell it to someone else. Maybe my opinion on this will change but that’s how I see it now. If a lender is dependent on selling off the names that he acquires through defaults to be made whole and has no other path to monetization, then the names weren’t worth much to begin with. This is partially why I hate picture file NFTs. They don’t do anything. If other people don’t want them, then they’re absolutely worthless.
If you really think your terrible name is worth as much as $10,000 well then there has to be a way for me to earn much more than $10,000 by making use of the name itself. This is how the game is won.