A Metaverse Manifesto, Part 14: Cheers to the death of the dumb NFT.
(Not sure how you got here? Start from the beginning with Part I.)
Ah…the quiet.
I live on the San Fransisco Peninsula, between Palo Alto and Sand Hill Road. From last fall until just now, the drumbeat of NFT fanaticism here grew. And grew. Smart people, eyes wild with FOMO, were throwing money at NFT projects without thought. The drumbeat got louder and louder. Faster and faster. It grew so freaking loud, I couldn’t hear myself think. I think I’ve had my hands over my ears, trying to think over all this frantic energy. Then…
P-O-P.
And now a moment of silence. Stop and listen… nothing. Now we can all take a deep breath and think. Let’s all catch our breath and slow down for one moment. We just need to stop running around like chickens with our heads cut off. Let’s recharge and get ready for the real future of the internet.
This NFT bubble “pop” — this Crypto Winter — is not the end of web3. It’s not the end of NFTs. It’s the end of DUMB NFTs.
“The internet is a fad.”
I’m a believer in the theory that the current market downturn parallels the dotcom market crash of 2000. Just like now, the early internet boom was unreasonable, frenzied, with confused media coverage and overinflated valuations. After the crash, investors closed wallets, money dried up, press turned negative, and old blue-chip businesses sighed with relief — they could go back to the old way of doing things. They could ignore this internet fad. (Remember how Borders outsourced that silly internet stuff to Amazon?)
Pets.com
If the current crypto/NFT market downturn mirrors the 2000 dotcom crash…then who is the Pets.com? If you aren’t familiar, look up tech’s favorite cautionary tale — that of Pets.com’s rise and fall in 2000. In a nutshell, Pets.com was all hype and Super Bowl ads and Macy’s Parade balloons, raising over $82 million…but their fundamental business model was non-existent. They didn’t have a path to make it WORK. This was no secret — people could have made that assessment at the time (and some did). But the frenzied drumbeat of market hype was louder than reason. Pets.com folded in under a year.
Clearing space for PURPOSE
I think most of us believers are unshaken: Web3 and blockchain technologies are fundamentally transforming our lives together…just like the internet continues to do. I believe that this downturn and bubble pop is necessary to separate blockchain and NFT products with true value, purpose, and utility from the “Juiceros” of web3.
Let’s welcome this moment of clearing out the “dumb” stuff: the overvalued NFT collections without utility, these near-criminal crypto ‘investment’ opportunities, the NFT drops being artificially propped up by their own creator’s investments, the cheaters and fake experts and carpetbaggers taking advantage of people we love.
Using this precious silence to THINK.
Let’s seize this moment to think. Strategize together. Let’s build products that serve a purpose and fill customer needs. Let’s have a basic idea of how our businesses can become profitable. If we clear away all of the frenzy and garbage, we are left with this gorgeous, simple blockchain technology. We are left with these beautiful systems of unique tokens or node, to which we can map infinite types of data.
I cannot wait to move beyond jpeg NFTs. NFTs-as-collectibles is a solid use case, but it should be just 1 vertical — a drop in the bucket of new use cases you brilliant people will come up with. I cannot wait to get to the good stuff — the convergence of identity and NFTs, unique tokens + our exact locations, using NFTs to bridge ‘gaps’ between the games we play and platforms we use.
And to the web3 community I’m just starting to know and love — the friends and founders and partners that get it... Are you with me? Let’s stick together in this moment of quiet. Let’s continue to build openly, together. Together let’s build the metaverse — not the VR game-like Metaverse with cartoon avatars, but the real metaverse — which is our shared IRL universe, improved with technology. The real metaverse, that let’s us put our devices down and get back to our lives, our IRL communities, to making eye contact, and participating in our life together. That metaverse.
So CHEERS. Let’s celebrate (quietly) as a community. We’re evolving. Here’s to getting rid of the dumb stuff — together.
Disclaimer: The thoughts and opinions in my blog are mine personally. Not representing my employer or my friends or my dog or my cult.
