Important post, which covers a good proposal with thoughtful guardrails, but the discussion has spent more time on liquidity mechanics than I think is useful.
IMO we don’t need more supply of NFTs, we need more demand for them. It seems the default way to do this is to try and drum up a bunch of hype and speculation, which is basically what drove the NFT boom before. That relies on bull market energy, spendy whales and hedge funds.
This is a bear market and that was the last cycle. That same toolkit won’t work. There’s little to no intrinsic value in the PFP or collectible markets* so they rely on massive community building to keep up novelty, excitement and prestige plus they’re totally limited to web3 native people and their money.
Let’s be real – if a project doesn’t have a competitive advantage in this kind of community building, it needs to find another way to create demand (eg partnering with big IPs) or it should pivot to something closer to real value creation. They have to make something people actually want somehow.
Ticketing, loyalty, gaming and other utility areas that touch web2 are more interesting targets for this because they’re (theoretically) better at creating reasons for users to stick around and keep the NFTs so they’re less dependent on a fickle niche market, plus they bring in net new users and net new economies into the ecosystem. This is particularly useful on NEAR because it was designed from the start to be better at onboarding normies than any other chain.
The responsibility for success really goes back to the founders of projects – what is your unique competitive advantage? What are your brand partnerships? How have you created exclusivity and hype in the past? If you haven’t, I honestly encourage you to shift gears and focus on solving other problems that tie closer to a real consumer demand. It’s extremely hard to create a net new IP with enough demand to sustain a market so how can you partner with others to piggyback theirs or to solve a “picks and shovels” problem that helps many others unlock that kind of value for themselves instead? Let’s make sure that anything getting funded can answer those questions too.
What’s going to drive this ecosystem isn’t manually helping art creators sell out hypey collections, it’s figuring out how to reach millions of new people or generate millions of dollars of real value using NFTs. That requires solving the upstream onboarding problem to make it seamless for web2 people to start playing and solving the downstream utility problem which creates reasons why they should try to play in the first place.
The next crop of billion-dollar companies that flower in the next bull run are going to come out of solving that class of problems and those are the problems that NEAR is best suited to solve. Let’s devote our time, money and creativity to solving them.