I once told a co-worker in real life about Solana NFTs and why he should get involved with them. I made some compelling arguments, and showed him the wide variety of NFTs he could choose from by scrolling through a marketplace. He was excited and said that he’d take a closer look at them once he got home.
The next day at work, I went up to him and asked him if he’s bought any NFTs. The answer was, surprisingly, yes! He was, however, quick to point out that many of the NFTs featured drugs such as cannabis, and that he wasn’t exactly down with that. The NFTs that he had chosen did not feature any drugs of course.
I was in full agreement with him.
I do not like recreational drugs at all, and so it reasonably follows that I don’t like them in NFTs either — and by drugs, I’m including even legal drugs such as cigarettes, cigars and alcohol. Thankfully, the drug meta in the Solana space has now shifted away a little bit since then thanks to the success of clean projects like Claynosaurz. There is, unfortunately, still a lingering underlying culture of drug use in Solana. Many projects that have nothing to do with drugs, for instance, include PFPs that are smoking joints or cigarettes.
Why? How is it relevant? How is the picture of a monkey or a wolf smoking relevant to anything?
So I get that there’s an underlying rebellious culture that the Solana ecosystem as a whole possesses; a sense that we are different from the rest of the world because they generally see cryptocurrencies and NFTs as a joke and only we really understand what we’re about. The flaunting of recreational drug culture may simply be an extension of that — and a way that we can showcase our wild sense of identity.
However, let’s step back for a moment and really consider the situation that we are in. There is no doubt at all that the world, in general, still broadly considers recreational drug use as something undesirable. Cigarettes and alcohol, for example, are legal in a vast majority countries. Yet, there is not a single country in the world that considers them good and wholesome things. They are, at best, guilty pleasures. I know that increasingly, many people feel that cannabis is entirely safe (it isn’t, but that’s a discussion for another day), but when Elon Musk smoked a joint on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Tesla stocks immediately tumbled. Even Elon is not immune to the judgement of the rest of the world.
So why should we care? Why do we need to pander to what the rest of the world thinks?
Because, quite simply, they have the money; and if we want our little NFT ecosystem to be adopted by people, we need to get them on our side. I know it may seem like the NFT ecosystem is already very big — but in the grand scheme of things, we are nothing more than a dot in the global economy. If disrupting the Web2 world is our ultimate goal, then we need to make ourselves more appealing to the world in general.
This is precisely why I am a big supporter of clean projects like Claynosaurz, Okay Bears, and Famous Foxes. Being acceptable to a wide audience is one of the key ways that Web3 adoption can grow. Not all projects necessarily need to be Disney and appeal to every single person on the planet, but as it stands now, the genre of a vast majority of NFT projects are simply far too controversial and fringe in the grand scheme of things. It is my hope that that percentage can swing greatly in favour of clean projects in the future. Perhaps a few fringe projects can still exist, just for overall balance — but it simply cannot be the majority if we want ourselves to gain widespread adoption.
As thought leaders in the NFT space, let’s do our best to guide the ecosystem towards a cleaner image in our quest to gain widespread adoption.
Written by: Jpegtologist
