The NFT art market is incredibly hot.
Collectors spent $22 billion on NFTs in 2021, up from $100 million the year before.
Late last month, Canadian cameraman Dan Olson released a two hour video about his strongly defended views on web3 and blockchain technology titled “Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs”.
In a nutshell: Olson claims that the technological limitations of web3 are such that it will never deliver on its promises. He goes a step further, essentially describing cryptocurrency as a scheme that creates more problems than it solves, is inherently inefficient, and allows early adopters to hack later participants until the system runs out of money. biggest fools.
I asked John and Alex to share their thoughts on Olson’s video as a starting point for discussing the state of the cryptocurrency industry in general. Here’s where we ended up:
- Walter Thompson: NFTs are hardly minimally viable products
- John Biggs: A shake-up has to happen for technology to take off
- Alex Wilhelm: I just don’t want your NFT
Walter Thompson: NFTs are hardly minimally viable products
It is factual to describe non-fungible cryptocurrency and token projects as speculative in nature. It is also indisputable that early adopters of cryptocurrencies, who enjoy a tremendous advantage over later entrants, are prone to gloss over widely discussed ethical concerns about how much energy is needed to produce these digital items and how they are traded. This is important, but there is another problem at work here:
Right now, NFT projects are narrowly minimal viable products that blockchain investors are using to validate their assumptions.
Non-fungible tokens have all the hallmarks of an MVP: a high barrier to entry that discourages all but the most enthusiastic early adopters, a minimal feature set, fluid use cases, and hints of future benefits that will more than offset the pain. of growth today.
A survey by Pew Research found that about 16% of Americans have bought cryptocurrencies so far, which shows how quickly it is catching on. Public companies like Nike and Visa are spending millions to get ahead of these unregulated and highly speculative investments.
Also noteworthy: most US residents couldn’t get their hands on $1,000 if they had an emergency expense.
Like Steve Blank, an entrepreneur who helped popularize the MVP framework once wrote, “you are selling the vision and delivering the minimum set of features to visionaries, not everyone”.
The NFT OpenSea auction market, home of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, closed a $300 million Series C last month that valued the company at $13.3 billion. According to CEO Devin Finzer, the platform has increased its transaction volume by “over 600x” in 2021, earning hundreds of millions in transaction fees.