NFT.NYC Recap
Four members of the GhostMarket team travelled to New York City for NFT.NYC on June 20.
Being held for the 4th time, the annual event this year attracted 16,000 registered attendees, 1506 speakers across 7 different venues that held 10 stages from which many people spoke and panels chatted.
To say it was an insane, crazy, mega 3 days would be an understatement!
Described as the ‘Superbowl of NFTs’ by Coinbase and the ‘WoodStock’ for crypto by the New York Times, this event certainly lived up to these comparisons.
Tuesday morning started off with many of the Times Square billboards lighting up with NFT.NYC artists, speakers, sponsors and communities. Conference creator Jodee Rich said that they had spent US$2m on the 45 minute display.
Here’s a quick rundown of the different tracks that our team attended.
At Radio City Music Hall on Day 1 — many ‘Featured’ talks took place. While some of them were pitches for the presenter’s products, a good number were about how people got started in the space and where they see it going.
Director Spike Lee talked about his journey into NFTs (recommended by his eldest daughter) and how he sees the future of movie finance and how NFTs can play a part in the way movies get released. NFTs offer movie producers and directors an avenue to funding that is outside of the major studios. If you can ‘sell’ your movie idea and raise capital for it through NFTs or coin drops, then you are no longer at the behest of the likes of one of the big studios like Paramount or Warner Bros for if your movie gets made or not.
A group of highly talented woman involved in crypto projects such as Boss Beauties, Fame Lady Squad, Flower Girls NFTs and Hello Sunshine, spoke about what it was like for women in the crypto space and the challenges they had overcome to achieve a successful project. The stand out point was that building community was key focus of what they are trying to do and the successes they have seen so far.
Developers
It was good for our developers to learn that GhostMarket was developing and/or implementing a lot of the current cutting edge blockchain and NFT tech into our platform. There were a few interesting talks about the current market and future prospects, along with discussions about developments in the open Metaverse and interoperability of assets. This is a huge area that might eventually see all those parents who purchased hundreds of dollars worth of Fortnite skins for their kids, get some of their money back! (At least I hope I will! lol)
Brands
The Brand stream talked mostly about new and established products for Web3 and brands that had adapted. For example Sony Electronics produced a Spatial Reality Display product that sold out, even with a price point of US$4,999. It allows collectors to display their NFTs at home in a 3D picture/screen environment.
Social
The social track talked about the benefits of building a community and also had a few sessions on working in the NFT space and how to get yourself job ready for it (it’s not rocket science, it’s pretty similar to apply for a ‘normal’ job).
Future
The conference speakers in the ‘Future’ track almost all talked about these three words;
Utility
Communities and
Metaverse.
When building out your project, when developing your roadmap, when hiring staff, these three words should be the cornerstones of your plans. Like with a lot of businesses (and even if you don’t think your NFT project IS a business, I’m here to tell you it most certainly is!), without a step by step plan your project will drift and go no where. Many speakers at NFT.NYC focussed on one or more of these three things in trying to help participants work out how to make their project successful. Think about how all three can be incorporated and if not all three, at least two of them.
Legal
The NFT ‘market’ from a legal perspective would appear to be a nightmare. While most sessions were US-centric, many countries or regions have a lot of catching up to do, when it comes to working out the legal requirements for ownership, copyright, IP rights, who really is responsible for the legal implications cause by DAO decisions etc etc.
It became clear pretty quickly, that many, many projects had not considered the legal or tax implications of their business (and that many didn’t even realise they had a real business after selling out an NFT collection). They are and have not really thought about what this means for them, or their hodlers.
Great Take-aways
Despite everyone telling us we are in a bear-market, it was clear that NFT lovers all over the World think differently. While the values of some of the largest collections may have fallen from the drop in crypto prices, all those present were bullish about the future.
Those companies of NFT Collections that would not survive this period, are probably the ones who shouldn’t be around; was the main consensus. The good projects, the projects and companies that offered more than just a digital image, were the ones who were going to be around for the long term (unless they were some of the OG collections & even those are evolving).
‘Utility’ was certainly the buzz word. Without it, your project would not amount to much in the longer-term and not really survive this period.
It was also clear that community building was essential for any project going forward. It was now vital that you spend time building a community ahead of your project launch. It is almost impossible to sell out a 10,000 NFT set, if you only have a few thousand followers on Twitter or Discord.
Work on building your community and nurturing that community. Start from the outset with a roadmap and utility for the brand and when you launch your collection, it is likely to be more successful.
View this current bear market as a BUILD market!
Now is the time to consolidate your ideas and plan out your roadmap so that you and your collection will be in a position of strength when the next surge in crypto currencies happens. We are EARLY in the Web3 timeline. Take advantage of it.
Not so Great Take-aways
It really is too big an event to manage to make it a pleasant experience for attendees. While New York is famous for its ‘lines’, NFT.NYC brought this to a whole new level (anyone seen the episode of Gilmore Girls about ‘lines’ in NY? All true!).
There were lines to get into the venues, there were lines on the escalators, there were lines at the coffee stands, lunch kiosks, crazy long lines at satellite events (some people lining up for 4+ hours to get in!), it seems liked the main feature of the whole conference was lining up for something (and sometimes people lining up, didn’t even know why they were in that line! -I kid you not!!)
Clearly 1500+ speaker sessions meant that there was no way to determine the quality of those sessions or the panels formed to discuss a particular topic.
Some of the speakers credentials were that they just happened to buy CryptoPunks or several BAYC NFTs early and that was their entire ‘claim to fame’. And because of that they gained early access to all the successful NFT drops since; “my wife has a Doodle and we got a WOW NFT for our newborn daughter”, etc etc.. Hardly a strategy the rest of us mere mortals can follow!
A ‘heads-up’ to companies who send non-english speakers to read out a speech (read promo) for their product, where the person hasn’t even read the copy (and certainly didn’t write it) and therefore had difficulty pronouncing many words, as they don’t know what they are talking about and it makes it very difficult for the audience to understand (barriers to intelligibility!) Don’t do it people, it’s a waste of your time and resources and ours!
Another negative is that it would appear it has become a COVID super-spreader event, as hundreds of attendees arrived home to being COVID positive!
Best Highlight!
These 4 GhostMarket team members (plus the Head of Marketing’s husband!) had never met in person before. It was incredible to spend time together, getting to know each other in person and talking about NFT’s and the future of the GhostMarket platform. We have big plans!
~ Michelle Peterson Clark, Head of Marketing.
About GhostMarket
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