Spend enough time in a community and you figure out who the players are. Take high school, for instance. If you’re the new kid in town, I bet within a week you’ll figure out who’s popular, who’s wannabe-popular, who’s mean, who’s actually nice, and so on.
After spending many, many hours on NFT Twitter, Discord, and YouTube, I’ve started to form theses about a few things:
Who the most influential NFT voices are
Which NFT projects have the most potential to last
What broader trends are emerging
For now, I’ll limit my scope to ProFile Pic (PFP) NFTs; art and photography NFTs and historical NFTs deserve their own articles. Projects that reward owners with passive income in the form of tokens, like CyberKongz, also merit a more detailed, future, discussion.
The Most Influential NFT Voices
In the current cacophony, it can be challenging to cut through the clutter to find value. But remember, this is a community founded by nerds and designed for nerds, and only recently has it attracted a slightly broader cross section of society. With that in mind, who are the alpha nerds that the other nerds look up to? Who are the people who are famous for building things that are valuable?
When I think of builders who I respect and admire, Dom Hofmann is the first person to come to mind. Not only has he created things like Vine (a pre-TikTok video sharing app) and the NFT project Loot, but he has several new projects in the works. He strikes me as someone who creates because he just enjoys figuring new uses for technology. I follow around 200 NFT-related accounts on Twitter and I think it’s noteworthy to see that more than half of those accounts follow Dom.
In NFT Twitter, there are so many influencer types with thousands of followers and hangers-on, so it’s refreshing to find people like Dom who don’t seem to have a marketing bone in their bodies but who are so talented that you can’t help but watch what they’re doing. Watching who these people talk to and collaborate with can help you discover other talented creators.
On a related note, I think nerds enjoy a natural immunity to hype and fluff. The kinds of people who are often influencers in real life like celebrities and athletes so far seem to hold little sway in the NFT community. In fact, the trend I’ve seen is for well-known people (like Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg) to use their own money to buy in to a certain NFT collection (CryptoPunks), as opposed to real life, where a brand might pay them millions just to rep a product. Similarly, projects launched with a celebrity or influencer figurehead haven’t usually done well.
The Blue Chips
Punks. Apes. The PFP collections that inspire the most reverence… and envy. Both sell for 6 figures (and sometimes 7) and are widely considered to be the most exclusive NFT status symbols. On the other hand, 99% of PFP collections are wannabes and are likely to stay that way unless they can form a lasting community that provides ongoing value for its members and/or ongoing status. But there are some recent collections that have hopped into the spotlight seemingly overnight, like CrypToadz. Why?
With a floor (as of writing) around 10 ETH and sales as high as 420 ETH (pun intended), the pixel art PFP collection “CrypToadz” has exploded in value since its debut in early September. Everyone suddenly seemed to be talking about Toadz and buying them, including several famous NFT whales. Their appeal seems to come from the nostalgic, retro pixel art, the “cool kids like them” factor, and the project’s Creative Commons license: anyone can use CrypToadz however they want. Many NFT projects launch with a “roadmap”, or a (perhaps dubious) plan for future developments like a game. The CrypToadz community purposefully doesn’t have one - “No Toadmap, just vibes” - and is almost gleeful in its disdain for tracking the collection’s floor price.
Let’s bring this back to high school for a second to illustrate: were the cool kids those who tried to be cool, or were they the ones who didn’t seem to care? The latter, right?CrypToadz have already inspired several derivatives, much like Dom’s Loot has. This might bode well for the future; enabling others’ creativity rather than gatekeeping seems to energize builders. There’s something amazing about the phenomenon in which people agree upon the first component of a shared reality and then begin creating within that world.
Again, there’s a burgeoning NFT artist and photography community that is attracting and commanding just as much or more attention and investment as PFPs, but that’s another article for another day. Historic NFTs like Rare Pepes - meme NFTs on the Bitcoin blockchain that date back to as early as 2016 - are enjoying an explosion in collector interest.
Emerging Trends
If people like Dom and projects like CrypToadz are attracting intense interest, what does that bode for the future of PFP NFTs? Waves of hype will eventually recede, leaving behind the projects that have lasting appeal, value, and that ineffable cool factor. However, these projects, for most, will be way too expensive to buy into once they’ve been anointed.
The current PFP trend seems to be people trying to find the next big thing, and of course, there probably will be several next big things over the years. However, there are currently a couple of ways people can get access to A-list projects on a limited investment budget:
Fractional ownership. While perhaps not as exciting as owning an A-list NFT, there are groups that pool their ETH to purchase a blue chip so members can own it jointly. Shark DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is one such group. It currently owns four Nouns; members can vote on proposals that direct the DAOs decisions.
A PFP collection that includes fractional ownership in a blue chip. New collections like Mutant Cats have been launched with the goal of purchasing a valuable NFT with the proceeds from their mints. Owners of the PFP not only get fractional ownership of the blue-chip (in the case of Mutant Cats, a Cool Cat), but also have their own Mutant Cats PFP and related community. This is probably more exciting for most people since they actually get to own the Mutant Cat PFP outright.
The Bottom Line
In such a fledgling space, it’s hard to have any confidence in predictions. But as NFT technology become more user-friendly and the user experience improves, it’s highly likely that there will be many times as many NFT collectors in the future as there are today. So I feel pretty safe with the following four prognostications:
People will spend more and more time online.
People will always want to look cool and flex.
People will be interested in figuring out what’s cool and what’s not.
NFTs will be continue to be a way to show status and tribal membership.
How about you? What do you think the NFT future might hold?
Thanks for breaking it down!