The Collapse of NFT

The last cry of NFT ended with the issuance of Pudgy Penguins' tokens

Author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke

1. The collapse of NFT

The last cry of NFT ended with the issuance of Pudgy Penguins’ tokens, and the recent issuance of Doodles’ tokens on Solana only made a few splashes. Yuga Labs’ subtraction continues, this time even the most soulful IP, Cryptopunks. The BitCoin NFTs in the last wave of NFT revival are almost zero. These once crazy narratives have indeed long gone into desolation and no one cares about them anymore.

10k PFP had a beautiful vision in the past, that a community of just the right size would help a bottom-up IP project go global, which is completely different from the traditional IP projects that first spent money on content support. For example, Disney's Marvel Universe, Star Wars, and various animated characters often require years of accumulation and countless funds to make these IPs deeply rooted in people's hearts and eventually become a gold mine.

NFT is completely different. It has a very low entry barrier and can build an IP and turn it into an asset very quickly. Creators only need to pay some gas to sell their artworks on Opensea. There is no need for galleries, toy companies, film companies, or any professional teams. An IP and a new artist are born.

We have also witnessed three or four years ago that some bottom-up IPs became popular in the top entertainment circles in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. A grassroots artist can also achieve a comeback through NFT. For me, as a Generation Z who grew up watching Japanese movies, it is a very dreamy thing to be able to participate in IP investment and incubation that ordinary people could not access through Crypto.

But later, after BAYC's "Crazy Nesting Dolls" and Azuki's disastrous sub-series Elemental were released. The vague status of NFT gradually became clear. It is not like a kind of equity or investment, but more like an expensive luxury with membership benefits. The project party also hopes that we can continue to purchase sub-series to support their subsequent continuous investment in the Roadmap of the IP value core. The seeds of contradiction were planted here. The project party knew that it was expensive to make content, but if they did not make content, the IP would die. The sub-series released every few months is constantly sucking blood from the OG series holders, torturing everyone in the community. It may take many years to wait for the feedback brought by the content, or perhaps this feedback will never come. The cracks began to grow, and those beautiful fantasies began to shatter with the decline in the floor price, and all that was left was all kinds of quarrels.

2. PoP MART, the Ace MCN of IP

If we regard NFT as a luxury trendy toy for Generation Z, its success and failure are clearer. In the era of fast food, it is not a bad thing to have no content. After all, the appearance alone can quickly attract buyers. For example, Azuki's painting style is quite in line with the aesthetics of Asians. Under the consensus, this grassroots NFT series can also become the third largest blue chip after BAYC. In the real world, well-known trendy toys such as Bearbrick, B.Duck, and Molly also have no content support, but they all rely on their unique appearance to become popular.

However, trends are always fleeting. Without content as the core value, these IPs may become outdated at any time. Limited by the culture of the cryptocurrency circle and the extremely low success rate of NFT, project parties often continue to make derivatives around an IP. But the reality is that the core has not even been taken shape, and this trend has passed.

Of course, there is also a type of PFP project that has sufficient content support, Japanese NFT. In the past, I have seen at least four or five projects with well-known Japanese comic IPs hoping to make great achievements in the NFT market, but they don’t seem to have thought about the fact that the fan base of IP is almost completely incompatible with this circle. The second point is that there are already too many peripherals of Japanese anime to choose from. Why should fans spend hundreds of times the price to buy a small picture? Of course, the most important point is the third point. This small picture can only be a picture, and the imagination space for future empowerment is 0. Even if you buy a Gundam NFT, you can only get the entrance to the Gundam metaverse "SIDE-G". Wanda’s profits from models, games, and animations naturally have nothing to do with you, and the community will not be a member of IP incubation, and it is even an outlier in the entire Gundam fan group. At this point, GameFi’s pain points are actually very similar.

So far, the PFP project has become a false proposition, and only the pragmatic little penguin is still working hard. So is there another way out for small pictures