This 
. Mistakes are learning opportunities. Everyone learns together if we share case studies of things going sideways.
Crypto is a nascent space. A map of pitfalls and clever thinking around them will get us a lot further than pointing at something successful and skipping towards it.
Is this a gap that Antisocialstudios would be willing to fill if:
A) Given the opportunity
AND
B) The support from NF is granted and clear?
while music and ticketing NFT projects will definitely be a big deal in the future, it is the community-focused PFP (profile picture) projects that garner the most user interest at this current point in time
Out of this entire post, this is what stuck out to me the most. Iâd respond with just a few questions/challenges:
The PFP NFT trend is one that is very much driven by speculation. There may be PFP âcommunitiesâ here and there that offer their holders benefits that go beyond exclusive âalphaâ discord channels and access to even more speculative assets in the future, but those seem to me to be few and far between. To what extent do we want to support this trend?
If music/ticketing NFT projects and other similar and practical use cases will definitely be a big deal in the future, isnât that what we want to invest the bulk of our time and attention towards innovating? If we go this route, arenât we just playing a different game (the long game), vs just trying to hop on a bandwagon that overemphasizes short-term speculation as a primary driver and that is destined to be short-lived once the more pragmatic use-cases have been proven?
There are many ways to attract short-term liquidity. One of those ways is to invest in trends, since the likelihood of short-term success may be greater if weâre catering to a trend that has generated a lot of buzz. What this approach doesnât do is guarantee long-term sustainability. It also doesnât necessarily support innovation, since itâs an approach that is largely reactive and not one that is looking to challenge trends by looking forward to the long-term potential of alternative use-cases.
This is absolutely true. Have we considered that NFT volume, the majority of which I assume are PFP projects, has simply collapsed across the board, too?
Itâs not an excuse, and I do think thereâs more that can be done. Namely because the communities which emerge from these PFP NFT projects can, and have, grown to become pillars of the wider community.
NEAR TVL would benefit greatly from more degen speculation of FT and NFT. I donât think itâs something NF can stand for, but through an arms length ecosystem fund it could work. Seems there is consensus that funding only helps a little and that a little bit of funding is better than none. Iâm in favor of a small grant enabling a lot of excitement.
For the long term play, which is where I see the strength of NEAR, itâs an entirely different game. Sweatcoin style progressive, custodial onboarding is going to bring the billions of users to web3 and make todays TVL concerns look quaint 
All those users will be showing up to nothing if the existing communty dies out before then.
I am hugely grateful for this thread - very insightful and constructive. Thank you, to all of you.
What I am reading loud and clear here is, âwe need someone (or a group) to help lead the path and take this onâ.
@antisocialstudios, are you willing to take this on? Should we get in details on what an ecosystem fund with several functions could look like to address the points raised here?
Hi all
WellâŚthis is a discussion that has been going on within NEAR for pretty much the whole of the last 18 months of my time in the ecosystemâŚand probably well before that. (Maybe with the exception of the the January/Feb explosion in interest/transactions)
The âMagNFTifyâ telegram group set up a year ago was brain-dumping ideas to turbocharge mainstream adoption of NEAR NFTâs on the back of the BAYC summerâŚand while there were lots of good ideasâŚboth long-term and short-termâŚnobody was really invested full-time in deliveringâŚwhich makes the ASAC @antisocialstudios âY Combinatorâ style proposal interesting:
http://gov.near.org/t/antisocial-studios-identify-incubate-accelerate/
TENK have been the key NFT innovators on NEARâŚand really should be involved too⌠if it suits them.
PersonallyâŚI believe that the opportunity/issue is multi-facetedâŚwhich probably suggests a broad spectrum approach is requiredâŚand that many things are probably true at the same timeâŚrather than in conflict:
SoâŚyesâŚhow about a dedicated body with overall full-time responsibility for a unified NFT strategyâŚwith divisions underneath it for separate verticalsâŚbut as @starpause says in the linked thread aboveâŚâThe scale of work that goes into running a program along these lines is massive.â
AnywayâŚall a good discussion 
Hi @markieke.flament We would also be willing to assist.Actually we are finalising a multi million dollar fund (outside of NEAR) to support future NEAR NFT/GameFi Projects, which will be supported by the team at Few and Far, to help grow the ecosystem, attract the best teams to NEAR and better compete with other chains.
This is a great thread - just want to add specifically from the GameFi angle⌠@marieke.flament
we are currently building a gamefi middleware layer for mobile games on Near (Unity based SDK with the Near Wallet embedded in it + other monetisation functionality for game developers like competitions) to mass onboard mobile games to the Near ecosystem via simple SDK.
We picked Near due to the awesome wallet for web2 users, but when you look at other chains - they are very well set up for supporting and mobilising gamefi projects
Having a gaming BD person is not enough unless you have the team behind it to help bring these projects to life - i think of it like mobile games publishing. You have a lot of choice between mobile games publishers to fund your projects, use your tools, the ones you choose is often about the people and add value they will bring in terms of game knowledge.
Keen to help here our really build and grow a clear gaming proposition/product/launchpad - already had some chats at Consensus with the folks at Few and Far how we could team up.
Thanks, Marieke. We really appreciate the response.
Weâre processing all the encouragement and feedback from the community.
Weâve started working on a proposal with key functions defined in detail and would love to share it when itâs ready.
New and intelligent ideas must be created for the NFTs market, where they provide quick solutions to the many problems that exist in the community.
Establish the mission and clear objectives for which the NTFs were created.
What is solved with this NFTs idea or project, (what solution does it bring to the community)?
Good marketing
Example,
Ideas on how to solve by means of Nfts
Logistic problems, by means of image recognition of Nfts
Product mobility problems.
People mobility problems
Hey @zeitwarp
Thanks for sharing these insights. We would also like to share our experience with this,
We were one of the guild coming out from âMagNFTifyâ to connect the NFT ecosystem. Our success was acknowledged when the Paras Team has appreciated us back in November 2021 by stating that âour presence helped the community to grow and connectâ
and just after a month since Januaryâ22. The Tenk Team played an important role in bringing the NFT Collection Communities to NEAR, supporting them via Consulting, Marketing and Launching Collections.
We would love to see TENK Team leading this initiative too.
Hey Naveen @NearNft âŚ
Yep, shouldnât dismiss your contribution. Your team have been pushing the NEAR NFT narrative across genres for a year now.
Hi NEAR fam,
Last week we successfully launched fewfar.com, a new marketplace on NEAR. If you have not checked us out please do so as we would love any early feedback to our beta.
We have been getting some great early reviews from the community which we are very happy about. https://twitter.com/NearGuru_/status/1554214048681558018
We are working closely with the NEAR BD team to win over some very large IP and projects with massive web2 + web3 audiences and the pitch is working well.
We are confident this approach of providing a curated launchpad, supporting the marketing of new projects will attract new NFT audiences into the ecosystem as well as essential tooling to support the projects. With the pitch, we have now brought 10+ new projects to the ecosystem and building on NEAR.
Our NFT Gallery widgets are also gaining traction from large publishers such as Coin Telegraph, to promote NEAR NFT collections to the mass market web3 audiences and increase sales. This type of innovation has not been seen before in the NFT space.
Looking forward to collaborating further with all the NFT Projects here on NEAR plus bringing onboard some âchain definingâ IP to jump start the NEAR NFT ecosystem.
If we can help at all or if anyone wishes to collaborate you can reach me at c_heyw00d on Tg.
Nice intiative,I also agree that most NFT suffer from marketing and community building.
An NFT project can have good vision and tech like most utility NFTs do but without having a strong community, they look ass compared to the pfp community that the community is strong.
If an NFT fund grant was to be passed weâll need to work the way y combinator works, grants/funds will be provided but also guidance/a boot camp is needed to teach how to community build and market!
Or just directly help them.
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 donât 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 wonât work. Thereâs 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 theyâre totally limited to web3 native people and their money.
Letâs be real â if a project doesnât 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 theyâre (theoretically) better at creating reasons for users to stick around and keep the NFTs so theyâre 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 â what is your unique competitive advantage? What are your brand partnerships? How have you created exclusivity and hype in the past? If you havenât, I honestly encourage you to shift gears and focus on solving other problems that tie closer to a real consumer demand. Itâs 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 âpicks and shovelsâ problem that helps many others unlock that kind of value for themselves instead? Letâs make sure that anything getting funded can answer those questions too.
Whatâs going to drive this ecosystem isnât manually helping art creators sell out hypey collections, itâs 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. Letâs devote our time, money and creativity to solving them.
Hello a quick question 
How can we know a legitimate NFT project on Near protocol.
Or can random people just start an NFT project on Near? Is there any certified NFT project.
Cause thereâs a new NFT project on Near (near coin flip) and I want to be sure if our money is safe to invest on it or any other NFT project thanks!
Hi Tonyesy,
There is never a sure way to verify if a project is 100% legitimate on any protocol across the NFT space or even DeFi space.
There are steps you can take such as verifying founders tenure and involvement within the space. Verifying if the founders are doxxed to either a 3rd party entity or to the foundation itself. Speaking to the founders and seeing how responsive/open they are about different aspects of the project.
