If the BAYC floor price falls below 15E, has NFT failed? I don’t think so. First of all, if persistent price slumps count as “falsification,” then Bitcoin has already been falsified countless times. Besides, as for the pioneering Punks, they actually haven’t fallen that far. Even if projects like BAYC and Azuki all declined and perished, that still would not prove that NFT has failed. By the same token, we can look at the history of FT: Bitcoin has gone up and down, while the other cryptocurrencies have gone quiet one by one. Of the FTs that were hot more than ten years ago, aside from Bitcoin, probably only LTC and Ripple still have some presence today; who still remembers the rest? But can that prove that cryptocurrency has failed? Similarly, in the future NFT world, Punk may still be Punk, and then there may be only two or three others like BAYC still breathing, while the rest are all new faces; yet the NFT way of playing may still become lively again.
The decline of this batch of NFTs has to do with both the project teams and the broader environment. On the one hand, the broader environment has excessively promoted the financialization dimension of NFTs, while downplaying their attributes as collectibles and elite communities (I’m not saying financialization is bad; I’m saying that an excessive emphasis and a too-hasty atmosphere are bad). On the other hand, project teams have also been too impetuous. In a community environment and technical conditions that were not yet mature enough, they rushed to do all kinds of “empowerment,” which in fact was just continuous cutting of the leeks. They massively produced derivatives to dilute community interest, and used various staking and similar gimmicks to overdraw profits, ultimately producing the result of yanking up seedlings to help them grow.
The relative resilience of CryptoPunks proves that NFTs really can forge consensus, and that they do not need all kinds of flashy empowerment and staking. Simply by virtue of the meaning NFTs naturally possess—recording historical events and marking cultural identity—they can sustain a consensus on value.
When I first started playing with NFTs, I already saw the similarity between the NFT craze and the tulip mania https://yilinhut.net/2022/01/07/8320.html The tulip mania was not the product of stupidity and madness, but of wealthy people’s need for status display meeting new breeding technology and financial technology. The bursting of the tulip bubble neither made the Dutch stop loving tulips from then on, nor did it negate the new model of trading vouchers.
My desire to build a history-and-culture-oriented DAO on the basis of NFT was something I had long been thinking about as well https://yilinhut.net/2022/08/02/8583.html These ideas of mine have not been proven or falsified by the ups and downs of BAYC’s price. In the NFT bear market, we are all the more worth calming down, returning to our original intention, rethinking the value and significance of NFTs, and exploring the path to NFT revival.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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