Consumer Goods and Community Totem: Looking at Women's Market from Coven to PFP

Original author: yikiiiii.eth|

This article is from the WeChat public account The SeeDAO.

This article is from the WeChat public account The SeeDAO.

Women's turning to NFT has increasingly become a direction that cannot be ignored in the NFT market.

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About Crypto Coven

Crypto Coven (Crypto Witch) is a group of NFTs that will be released on Halloween night 2021. This group of nearly 10,000 witch portraits are different, some of them have cat eyes, some have veils, or prophets, or wizards, combined into female images with different styles.

Witch's creators are two amateur artists in the tech industry. Since its launch in November last year, the team has hardly done any marketing for coven, let alone the exposure of celebrity collaborations.

But such a Buddhist project has gradually attracted more and more members, and now there are more than 6,000 members in the discord community. Many fans said on twitter, "This is the community with the best atmosphere I have ever seen", and some people love witches so much that they spontaneously imitate the hairstyles and jewelry in the pictures, spontaneously make peripherals and promote them on social media...

Many celebrities and Eastern and Western KOLs have also gradually joined the witch family, including Kat Dennings, the lead actor of Bankrupt Sisters, and Zuckerberg's sister Randi Zuckerberg, who once put on witch avatars.

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Crypto Coven  

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Minorities: The Women's Market in the Crypto World

Coven's most distinctive artistic feature is its feminine style, and this starts with its two female founders.

Last summer, Coven designers Aletheia and Nyx paid attention to NFT digital art. They were very interested, but couldn't find an NFT project that represented female tech practitioners like them. Based on this opportunity, they decided to draw one by themselves—thus there was the series of witches.

Behind such a market gap is the unequal gender structure in the encryption field.

Throughout the crypto market, men consistently dominate. According to a Business Insider report in October 2021, only 15% of Bitcoin traders are women, and only 12% of Ethereum investors are women.

The same is true of the NFT market: Whether buyers or creators, the number of women participating in the NFT market is far lower than that of men. According to a survey report by ArtTactic, an art market research organization, in November 2021, as buyers, female users on Nifty Gateway, a digital art trading market, accounted for only 15%, while as creators, male artists accounted for only 15% of NFT primary and secondary market transactions. The contribution is as high as 77%.

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Beeple's style of writing

Indeed, whether it is the BAYC of the avatar-like NFT or the Beeple of the art-like NFT, the main audience is men, full of obvious male tastes.

If the price of NFT directly reflects its popularity among the audience, then the investment logic given by F2Pool co-founder Shenyu: "Buy men and not women, buy white and not black, buy monsters and not people" , is a footnote to the status and financial power of white men in the encryption market. NFT prices for women, black images are always lower than similar men and whites.

However, as more and more women begin to enter the crypto market, this investment logic is being broken.

The more unequal the disadvantaged group is, the more they want to change the status quo, and the consensus and goals of the group are clearer and stronger.

The first to target the female NFT circuit is Fame Lady Squad (FLS). In July 2021, FLS entered the NFT market under the banner of "the first female virtual human project", and sold out NFT avatars worth 1.5 million US dollars within a few weeks. However, not long after, netizens picked out that the three founders of FLS named after women were actually male programmers from Russia. The appeal of FLS feminism collapsed instantly, and the price of NFT also plummeted.

But in any case, the female NFT track has been discovered since then, and a series of NFT projects under the banner of feminism try to fill the gap in the female track.

The Women Rise project launched in November 2021 tells a story that challenges the authority of web3 men. When its founder, Maliha Abidi, a Pakistani-American female artist, participated in an NFT event in New York, the first sentence she was asked was: "Are you sure you are in the right place?" This made her deeply aware Gender inequality in the encryption field, so the idea of ​​​​improving the status and participation of women in web3 was born. And NFT with fashion and artistic attributes is an ingenious entrance for women to enter the encryption field.

The goal of Women Rise is to build an NFT community that unites and represents women in the technology industry and the blockchain field, and promises to donate 7.5% of its income to organizations that support gender equality, girls' education and mental health, including the Malala Public Welfare Fund. Maliha Abidi also hopes to one day open a school for girls in the virtual world.

In addition to Women Rise, well-known female-led NFT projects also include World of Women, Boss Beauties, and Women and Weapons-you can feel their strong feminism and clear political stance just from their names, and therefore called for a A batch of NFT players working to bridge gender bias and inequality.

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Coven: Depoliticized Feminine Style

In contrast, Crypto Coven's art style is completely different-most intuitively, she is better looking than the above avatars. A witch is more like a female star in a fashion magazine - with more elaborate makeup and accessories, beautiful, confident and attractive.

This shows that Crypto Coven has chosen a path of depoliticization. It does not call on women under the banner of women's rights, but uses artistic aesthetics to break into the women's consumer market.

In terms of the overall image, the witch caters to the typical aesthetic characteristics of female consumption - wavy hair, colorful eye shadows, and delicate faces are beautiful images that will be welcomed by men. But in addition to beauty, witches also exude magical and mysterious charm, showing a sense of rebellion against authority.

This strong rebellious character is due to the detailed design of witches in art and text, which together create a unique witch temperament belonging to Crypto Coven. Head tilted slightly contemptuously, eyes looking straight ahead confidently, grimly and unflatteringly; some random detail—the tattoos on the face, the black lips, the scar at the corner of the eye, the nose ring and veil, the crescent moon jewelry, and a pair of horns— —It is not the image of an urban girl in reality, but a personality punk full of deviant meaning.

The overall beauty and the deviance in the details not only allow women to easily project their pursuit of beauty, but also express rebellious emotions—maybe it is the other side of themselves that do not obey the mainstream values, or it may be the other side that resists male authority. The awakening of female consciousness together constitutes the spirituality unique to witches.

The temperament of a witch happens to be a contradictory psychological projection of web3 women.

NFT is a product with high capital and knowledge thresholds, and most female participants in the field are also highly educated and have purchasing power. In the real society, they may achieve certain achievements under the existing social rules and play expected social roles, but at the same time, to a certain extent, they suppress the inner impulse to resist social rules.

Reflected in NFT consumption, they may not only admire and yearn for beautiful appearance, but are unwilling to obey the aesthetics constructed and imposed by society. The enchanting and dangerous aura of witches perfectly meets the psychological needs of this kind of people.

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Emotional Construction of Women's Community

Witch subtly satisfies the consumer psychology of web3 women and realizes self-projection, but without the call of strong feminist ideology, the construction of this subtle culture is even more inseparable from the operation of the community and the construction of the brand.

“Lore,"not floor" (discussing stories and legends, not the price of NFT) is one of the most important precepts in the witch community, borrowed from another wizard-like NFT project, Forgotten Runes Wizards Cult.

Although the NFT community is inevitably tied to money, the operators of witches suppress the atmosphere of speculation and hype in the community as much as possible, and focus on building an atmosphere around witch culture. For example, organize witches to read science fiction book clubs together, give witches exclusive NFT gifts for Valentine's Day, etc.

In the roadmap, the project party also stated that it will cast more witches on Layer 2, so that more people have the opportunity to join the community—but more development plans are still a wasteland, waiting for the joint construction of witches.

Witches come together based on common tastes and hobbies. They spontaneously imitate the costumes of witches online, participate in community activities and rituals, and sometimes become real friends offline, having dinner and chatting.

One of the main creators of Witch, xuannu.eth, explained her idea of ​​community building: marketing instead of marketing. She agrees with the marketing method of "building a brand" rather than "growth hacking": growth hacking is about swiping orders, whitelist competition, and chasing popular trends;The brand is investing in interesting event design and cultural tone, so as to reach the real target group。 

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Consumer Goods and Community Totems: Sources of NFT Valuation

The style of feminine aesthetics and high-quality community construction make Crypto Coven a representative of the combination of consumer goods and community totems. I want to talk about why NFT is so "expensive" from this perspective, trying to analyze the source of valuation behind it.

For the female track, Coven proved that in addition to taking the path of strong feminist ideology, female NFT can also take the route of aesthetics and consumer products. Female holders in the Coven community may even say: "Since I bought Coven, I don't even want to buy a bag." To some extent, this reflects a motivation for them to buy Coven—as a reward for luxury goods. kind of substitution.

Although the current NFT market is still highly speculative, we can still imagine that as NFT becomes more popular and popular in the future, its commodity characteristics will gradually emerge. For example: sports fans buy sports NFTs, two-dimensional lovers buy two-dimensional NFTs, feminists buy women’s NFTs... In fact, there have been such collectors who only collect specific types of NFTs they like NFT is like buying your favorite products.

Generally speaking, objects themselves are consumed and then possessed by people. The driving force is the reflection of self, and people express their own values ​​symbolically through objects. At the same time, in a set of NFT, each picture is different from each other based on algorithm generation, resulting in random and subtle personalization. Such differences further inspire people to project themselves on the pictures. The more they look at a certain avatar, the more they look like themselves, and even take the initiative to imitate the avatar in the picture.

If offline consumption is based on me as the main body, and the symbolic expression is carried out, then the virtual image on the Internet is a construction process from scratch. The objects of consumption have changed from symbols to the self itself, and the symbols and the culture attached to them are gradually internalized as part of the self. Furthermore, the boundary between real and virtual is gradually blurred, and consumer goods have become more and more self-construction from symbols of external expression. Humans and digital consumer goods imitate and shape each other。 

This is an important reason to understand that the value of a jpg will exceed that of a designer bag. The high valuation of NFT does not only come from financial hype, it has its deep cultural connotation and the inherent identity mechanism of the virtual world. — We will always spend money on the construction of "me".

Therefore, how to visually create an NFT that can mobilize users' self-identity and build identity imagination in the virtual world will be something that all NFT projects will have to consider in the future. This is also an important reason why NFT project parties will compete for top art resources next.

In addition to art, operations are also crucial to the success or failure of a project. Almost all NFT project parties are eager to allow community members to hold their own NFT for a long time. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to build a community worthy of long-term stay, and turn the NFT of your own project into an effective identification signal, a totem, a cultural and reputation capital.

Under the promise of blockchain decentralization, people's imagination of technological trust replaces traditional interpersonal trust.Strangers around the world have an intimate sense of commonality based on the same set of NFT narratives.If operated properly, the project party will be able to construct the atmosphere of the community through continuous interaction, ceremony, and exchange, so that people with high spiritual concentration will continue to flock to the community and form a specific culture in the community. When this culture is built to a certain extent, the NFT will become a clear cultural symbol.

NFT allows people's consensus and differences in social status to be expressed in an open and monetized manner. It intuitively reflects the wealth level of the holders and their respective tastes. The sociality and differentiation of NFT may explain why NFT often has a shorter hype cycle than FT (homogeneous token), and it is easier for people to FOMO (Fear of missing out). Because not only economic capital, but cultural capital and social capital are also presented in a decentralized infinite space.

All in all, the NFT avatar is just a small picture on the surface, but its value actually comes from the community and culture. The visual image of PFP works is responsible for lifting the self-projection and identity imagination of community members, and the continuous operation of the project party is responsible for the long-term construction of the community. This is the real source of NFT value, apart from the hype.

Because of this, the more speculators in the project, the weaker the illusion of the community, so in a community without imagination, small pictures are really only worth small pictures.

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