Wang Feng: Fifteen observations and conjectures on the quietly evolving NFT trading market in the past year

Original author: Xiaoyin Yulian (Wang Feng)

Original author: Xiaoyin Yulian (Wang Feng)

The author was successively in charge of computer anti-virus products and digital entertainment business department in Kingsoft before 2007, and later founded Linekong Interactive to focus on game design, production and distribution, from PC end games, web games to mobile games, until 2014 in Hong Kong listed. In early 2018, he entered the encryption field and founded Consensus Labs and Marsbit. In 2021, joined the Element NFT trading platform product team, and promoted the incubation of the metaverse platform PlayerOne.

This article briefly reviews fifteen aspects of the current NFT market, trading protocols, community governance, aggregators, and public chain ecology. If you read it patiently, you will understand the key intention of my article, the possible or ongoing changes in the NFT market.

1. The road to the encrypted version of Ebay

Let's review the growth path of OpenSea again. Eighteen months ago, few outsiders had heard of OpenSea. Today, its market value has soared 10 times, and it has become an upstart in the $10 billion club. Crypto investors often benchmark Coinbase and Binance against their dominance in the cryptocurrency market.

Choice is more important than hard work, but it is more difficult to stick to the initial choice, especially in the enticing crypto market. The development history of OpenSea seems to be "the fantasy drifting of encryption school". In September 2017, the ERC721 protocol and the CryptoKitties project had just come out, but due to the high concurrency of the game chain at that time, the Ethereum network was paralyzed, the project failed, and the imitators died down. OpenSea was born in response to the situation, but it did not thrive in response to the situation. Until September 2021, the NFT market has been in a dormant state for a long time. The adventurers who set out on a great voyage may not have imagined that they thought they would at least reach the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost tip of the African continent, but they sang "all the way north" and walked to Greenland. It is hard to imagine how insensitive their team is to external stimuli, walking in a market path that seemed to be very narrow at the time, how did they survive the past five years in the encryption market?

-Blockchain public chain concept is hyped

-Bitcoin fork farce

-Dapp illusion of sentient beings

-Trading platform spot and contract battle

- The suffocating crypto bear market

-Filecoin mining again

-DeFi Summer

-The rise of Uniswap

- Algorithmic Stablecoin

-Axie takes the GameFi marketplace on fire

In the past five years, I have appeared on the stage after you sing. In the encrypted theater, NFT is the only one that occupies the C position. OpenSea maintains development and operation with a small investment, and is gradually favored by investors until it becomes popular. The two core founders are ordinary engineers from large Silicon Valley factories. They have no experience in cryptocurrency before, but they are working on encryption. In the grand vision of the version of Ebay, overcome all obstacles, avoid interference and temptation, and persevere like a long march.

2. List of contributors

Social platforms have played a huge role, which has greatly promoted the outreach of NFT, allowing more people to participate, voice their voices on social platforms, and show their works. In terms of global social and search popularity, NFT, which has broken the circle layer by layer, still occupies the top hot words list in the encryption field, and its influence exceeds blockchain and Bitcoin.

In this way, I subjectively give a list of contributors to the NFT market in 2021. I did not mention Axie Infinity because NFT does not appear in the NFT trading market of mainstream public chains. Exactly the following ten digits:

-Jack Dosy, and the Twitter he founded, I always think that the market is underestimating this man who is as rebellious as Elon Musk.

-Beeple, The First 5000 Days, and the guy who paid $69 million.

- CryptoPunk before the ERC721 protocol, they actually inspired Dapper Labs to design the ERC721 protocol in the first place. I have so far held several avatars that cost me 400 ETH.

- Boring Ape and Yuga Labs, my experience is that no matter you are in Web2.0 or Web3.0, don’t underestimate any ugly and strange face. will become scarce.

-Dapper Labs, ERC721 protocol and CryptoKitties, the founders of their NFT world, Flow public chain is a game public chain built by their team.

-The wonderful moments of the great NBA and Topshot, the NBA's brand status is unparalleled, and their entry into the NFT market is bound to have a huge effect.

-OpenSea, the pioneer of the trading platform, has become the infrastructure, standardized the product logic of the trading platform, and they have won the biggest dividend in the NFT market.

-Animoca Brand, this company was originally a mobile game developer similar to our Linekong Interactive. After 2017, it completely transferred the company to the encryption field, but its main interest is still the blockchain assets related to games. In April last year, we also talked with Yat Siu about how to purchase their IP. In the second half of the year, I feel that the distance between us is farther than before in the game industry.

-A16Z Capital, generally praised by the crypto industry today and sharply criticized by some, should be noted.

-Elon Musk and his mother, why am I getting more and more annoying with him lately.

Since the first half of last year, the DeFi market combination composed of DEX, decentralized lending, and a variety of algorithmic Stablecoin platters began to give way to colorful and strange-looking PFP markets. At first, many people thought it was incredible. Knowing that it can’t catch up, in this way, in the season that some people call NFT Summer, OpenSea found a new continent with dense forests and became the biggest market winner. The bored ape opened its big mouth, which occupies almost half of its face, and sucked the marijuana in its mouth, assisting Yoga Labs to create the dream of an encrypted next-generation entertainment empire.

And the reason why I put Jack Dosy and Twitterr at the top of the list of contributors in the upper column is because I think Twitter is the biggest driver of the NFT market.

3. The attack and ambition of the product company

By the fourth quarter of last year, OpenSea had occupied 97% of the Ethereum NFT market, which made many digital asset trading platforms envious and shocked, and eager to respond to the enemy with products that seemed to be produced overnight. Mainstream cryptocurrency trading platforms such as Binance, Huobi, and FTX entered the market one after another, and even Coinbase entered with a high profile, but did not achieve the desired effect.

There is a big market misunderstanding here. Many investors believe that resources and traffic are the key capabilities to enter the NFT market. These resources are only the capabilities of the primary market. No matter how good Launchpad's performance is, it is temporary, or even a word of mouth trouble. If the products of a platform cannot support the secondary market well, no matter how much the traffic and resources obtained at the cost will eventually become the fluid sand in the open sea of ​​OpenSea.

Compared with the giants, the new product companies are very active. From their continuous product innovation, we can see many ambitious starts. According to my observation, except for a few of these product teams who have explored in the DeFi field, more of them come from the Web2 field. Product R&D accumulation.

-On the Solana public chain, Magic Eden quickly became the leader in the market

-Trading aggregators, first Geine, then GEM, and then Element to catch up

- Support multi-chain trading market, Tofu, Element and NFTtrade

-Token trading reward platforms Looksrare and X2Y2

- Data dashboard, Nansen occupies the leading position in the professional market, followed by NFTGo, NFTtrack and TwitterScan with some new data indicators

- Wallet market, Bitkeep NFT Market with built-in NFT aggregation market

-Vertical platforms for games are gradually emerging

But it must also be seen that a gradually multi-path diversified NFT trading market form has almost the embryonic form of competition and evolution from many platforms such as Yunbi, Binance, OKex, Huobi, and Kucoin. Let's put aside the operational capabilities, just in terms of product iteration, the trading platform has evolved in this way.

- Currency transactions

-Spot Trading

- Futures and contracts

- quantization and gridding

-Documentation system

-Financial management and loans

The NFT trading market focuses on transactions today and expands lending tomorrow. Today is a war of tools and data. In the next step, I believe that the composability of the DeFi market will migrate over sooner or later. I believe that this market will sooner or later face a complex competitive situation similar to the CEX trading platform. Technology, market , operations and capital, none of which is missing.

Four active forces

We don't consider the interference of the bearish market. If we observe the teams that continue to iterate products in the bear market, this trend is relatively positive. At present, in the user spillover from the OpenSea market or the new participating user market, the next most active market players may develop and derive from the following three paths:

-Tool flow for aggregation transactions

- Operational flow of transaction rewards

- Track the data flow on the chain

According to my personal intuition, the three forces that have just taken shape will gain more and more market share, and the products and operation teams of these three parties will absorb each other and learn from each other in aggregation transactions, Token-driven governance and data tracking services. strengths. According to such iterations of products and operations, the NFT market will gradually grow into a new paradigm, which may be completely different from today's platform products.

Of course, the above conclusions are narrowly relative, limited to the current mainstream protocols, there is still a lot of room for improvement, and product design is insufficient in guiding liquidity. It is also possible to break through it from a new angle.

In the next step, there are many problems that need to be verified and unlocked in the interpretation of market changes. Like the fog of the battlefield in the strategy game "Heroes of Might and Magic" I played when I was young, it is difficult to imagine the actual appearance of the next step without activating the new map. Perhaps, today's NFT market is likely to be just a preschool competition stage, and the big exam is far from coming.

5. Slow and drastic changes in trading agreements

Let's focus on the transaction protocol on the Ethereum L1 market. "To adapt to change, the same is the dying body." Looking at the level of the decentralized trading protocol, it is full of variables. The semi-centralization problem, which has been criticized by Web3 nativist believers, hangs behind OpenSea like the sword of Damocles.

For example, whether it is the Seaport protocol that Base migrated not long ago or the previous Wyvern, OpenSea's orders are all implemented in the Offchain mechanism. Can we fully implement OnChain in Ethereum L2, like the current Magic Eden on Solana, which is completely based on on-chain order matching, which is more efficient for asset transaction aggregation to better achieve composability similar to DeFi.

Let’s first review how several decentralized trading protocols in history have evolved.

-OpenSea's Wyvern has been used until the end of May this year, and it is considered to be the NFT protocol layer retired player with the longest fighting time. It should be noted that the protocol change in the decentralized encryption market is not the logic of operating system and application upgrades, which are either abandoned or simply used in parallel.

- OpenSea recently migrated and deployed the Seaport protocol, which greatly reduces the gas fee. It is almost the most important protocol in the entire encryption market. The gas destroyed has exceeded the Uniswap protocol. OpenSea is migrating most of its business to this protocol superior.

-Looksrare uses its own protocol

The -0x protocol released V4 in March this year and was directly deployed and used by Coinbase. Unfortunately, the Coinbase NFT market is doing too poorly.

-ElementEx, compared to Seaport, further reduces Gas, and passed the Certik audit not long ago. The protocol extension application toolkit has opened the API.

Then, the next step is that there are already some NFT fragmentation and lending agreements on the market, which are still in the stage of research and judgment by professional investors. From the perspective of application, they have not aroused positive response from the mass market.

The above are all slow and dull changes, and the bigger changes may come from a guess.

Better support for transactions and financial derivatives, more robust protocols, whether the composability effect between NFT and DeFi will happen, still lacks a new bull market.

At present, the ecology on Ethereum L2 has basically not improved, but what is the next step?

Don't forget, the protocol is the heart and operating system of decentralized applications, such as AMD and Intel, Apple iOS, Google Android and Huawei Hongmeng in mobile phones. Protocol change is not a simple upgrade. It is as simple as adding a Patch to a Web2 application. Let's wait for each trading platform to release V2, V3 and V4.

6. Why is the aggregator?

Today, it is not a few heavyweight cryptocurrency trading platforms that have changed the status of the NFT market, and it is not Rarible that launched the Token mechanism very early. Their product design has entered a dead end from the very beginning (many entrepreneurial teams who followed their product design are completely and completely silent), nor the art market Superare and Foundation, although they still have good potential, but their target market is relatively too niche.

What really started to shake the OpenSea market is the team that implements Aggregator with tools and boldly adopts the Tolen Incentive mechanism, that is, an aggregator like GEM and a transaction reward mechanism like Looksrare.

Here, let's talk about why NFT aggregators are? First of all, we can also see the inevitability of mainstream NFT trading platforms completely opening their trading APIs. Many people think that aggregators have taken away OpenSea's market share. In fact, the relationship between aggregators and trading platforms should be a win-win situation.

The market is moving forward, but suddenly looking back, the former beauty in the north has changed beyond recognition, and I absolutely can't bear to look back. The launch of the Internet 20 years ago, the decline of Yahoo and the miracle of Google have all taken us by surprise. Twenty years later, in the era of blockchain with the goal of financial revolution, we look at the relationship between Uniswap, Sushiswap and 1Inch on the DeFi stage, is it somewhat similar.

However, comparing the DEX and NFT trading markets, there is a big difference in the nature of decentralization. Uniswap is a completely decentralized pure protocol trading platform; OpenSea, although the trading protocol itself is a smart contract on the chain, most of the business processes are grafted on the OffChain, relying on off-chain operations as order processing efficiency platform. Because of this, many people in the industry believe that OpenSea has a high barrier to entry and a moat.

In fact, when more trading platforms start to rise, NFT market aggregators will have a more significant efficiency advantage. For example, as Looksrare and X2Y2 adopted the transaction incentive mechanism successively, and each gained some shares, the market was torn open. Although the performance of pending orders in their handling of full-chain assets is not perfect, it has also found enough rationality for the existence of NFT aggregation trading platforms such as GEM and Genie. Just imagine, without the participation of more NFT trading platforms, GEM can only be a tool experiment field for OpenSea's tool innovation and user experience.

When it comes to tools, let’s take a look at how GEMs first aggregated, and then used many excellent product manager capabilities similar to Web2.0 to gradually erode the OpenSea market with leading product designs?

- Bulk purchase of Cart

- Batch pending orders

-Cross market pending order

-Collection Offer

-Sweep

-Enter the primary market embedded Mintlist

- To make the product easy to use, there are still many things to do next. The revolution has not yet succeeded, and developers still have to work hard.

To be honest, if we look at the idea of ​​benchmarking management and rapid iteration advocated by major Internet companies for many years, OpenSea can be fully realized on its own platform sooner or later, although I don’t think it is necessarily OpenSea’s product concept or value , It is undeniable that their product upgrade speed is too slow. But they bought GEM today, which is a clever and decent explanation.

7. Not opening the API is going backwards

Some people once wanted to enter the market in a social way, or rely on resources to occupy the upper reaches, but in terms of the liquidity of products that traders are more concerned about, it is also far from quenching their thirst.

Aggregation has become an important gene for the next NFT market, and it is no longer an independent product concept. In the era of Microsoft's dominance, the most commonly used key word was integration (Integration), which was later criticized as evidence of monopolies bullying the small. For example, in 1998, Microsoft released the Win98 operating system that directly integrated the Web browser, which made Today, Andsen, the founding partner of A16Z, lost Netscape's initial leadership in the Internet market and died at the start. In the era of Google and Facebook, the aggregation of information has been emphasized, and the keyword has become aggregation (Aggregation).

In the Web3.0 era, the composability we often mentioned in the DeFi era is very much in line with today's asset and order aggregation. To allow aggregation to fully share the market growth dividend, Open API must be proposed.

OpenAPI is about to face A/B selection - opportunities and challenges. Third parties can call your order data and use it freely to improve the efficiency of the platform, but those who do not open it will be isolated and sooner or later they will become isolated islands. Unlike encrypted asset trading platforms in the centralized era, any NFT trading platform actively opens APIs. From a political point of view, in the era of great exploration of Web3.0, whoever does not open up APIs is engaging in Web2.0's mountain topism. In the sense of game theory in economics, facing the prisoner's dilemma, based on the premise of "rational economic man", the choice of two prisoners in their own interests is to confess. Only by opening APIs, sharing and managing the liquidity in the entire ecology, all parties remain rational can we get out of the prisoner's dilemma and achieve the Nash equilibrium point.

During the heyday of Web 2.0, WeChat adopted an open platform strategy, and Alipay and Paypal opened up payment one after another, all based on this consideration. It is precisely because of the entry of more NFT trading platforms that the aggregator can become a natural price comparison system, providing traders with cross-market handicap and the opportunity to provide the best Floor Price (floor price) in all markets. So, in a sense. The entry of Lookrare, X2Y2 and more resource platforms, and GEM are also mutual achievements.

8. Design transaction rewards and DAO community governance model

Similarly, the NFT trading market that adopts Tokenize in operation proves that it can exist and obtain sustainable development opportunities. Let’s take two interesting cases and compare them in terms of operational design:

-Looksrare, starting from the top-down perspective of overseas community packaging and focusing on brands, the market action is most like a vampire attack. We must admire the courage and means of their team. First of all, we did trading mining at the tail end of the bull market, which was once criticized as a few large assets self-purchasing, and then began to pay attention to the Listing Reward of blue-chip NFT. They've been doing it wisely.

-X2Y2 started with the domestic community, from bottom to top, and gradually came from behind. First, it made pending order rewards, but at first it did not directly promote the transaction, and then made several operational adjustments. You can go to see the operation adjustment process of X2Y2, and you will know how to go all the way It's not easy. I noticed that today X2Y2 will also put the more direct Trading Reward in the first place.

-It is obvious that they learn from each other in competition.

From the perspective of an observer, I found that their attempts to operate such as user growth and user retention based on Token governance logic are mirrors of each other, criticizing and absorbing each other, which also provides opportunities for future market entrants. It is a very valuable experience, which reminds me that compared with the operation of platform currency on the trading platform, the complexity of the former is even more promising, so that I found that I had no experience before.

There are many problems that cannot be avoided, such as:

- reward who? Trader/Order Provider/Recommender/Sharer

- Reward Trader? Then you may have no one to take the initiative to place an order

- Reward Listing, how to design? So be careful a lot of whores

-Referrer and sharer rewards

- If every company attaches great importance to the built-in primary market in the next step, will those who put it on the shelves be rewarded?

-Should there be a community-autonomous DAO reward fund, open to potential collaborators such as creators, artists, GameFi, etc., in the way of DAO governance?

The above reminds me of my memories of the time when I participated in game production. The more troublesome problem than server stability and third-party plug-ins when dealing with large-scale concurrent events is how to do a good job in system planning and numerical planning, and at the same time keep the operation event planning script in Lua language for the operation team. Work hard on operational capabilities.

9. An aggregator is not equal to an aggregate trading market

More platforms are emerging, and aggregation follows the general trend. Even the aggregation mode will be in the NFT market of various paths. No one can underestimate the market value of an aggregated transaction flow portal with powerful tools.

In June, OpenSea acquired GEM.

In July, Uniswap acquired Genie.

Both NFT and DeFi leaders took down the aggregator. It is not difficult for us to guess what their next step is.

However, GEM and Genie's schemas also have headaches. In fact, they are not considered an NFT trading platform in the standard sense, and none of them provide their own trading protocols. As a pure transaction aggregator, all its orders come from the aggregated third-party orders. To use an analogy, the business logic in their contract is equivalent to adding a composite function called shopping cart to the original transaction function.

In addition, they must abide by the trading commission ratios written by different trading markets, and do not provide premiums in order to please users. For example, OpenSea is 2.5%. Looksrare is 2%. X2Y2 currently offers 0.5%. It is difficult for GEM to place a premium on it as an explicit benefit of matching transactions. Their rankings on Net Revenue and Dapprader are not in line, because they do not have transaction fees as income, and their business model may be questioned.

10. The three-stage rocket of Elememt2.0

Last July, Sequoia Capital, SIG and Drangonfly Capital invested in Element. In September, the first version of Element was released, and it didn't spark a buzz until we recently saw Element 2.0.

The previous products were either issued or not, or were they doing their own transaction agreement or focusing on pure aggregation? Element2.0 does not do this, but adopts a Web3 design mechanism similar to a three-stage rocket. In fact, it is a three-tier structure.

Although the three-tier structure is implemented based on the mixed technology stack and tools of Web3 and Web2, it is indeed a commercial three-tier design. I hope you don't use physics to think about it.

- The first layer is to use the aggregator that writes cross-market transactions to solve the basic ability of product service liquidity. This first layer is very important. I have seen many NFT teams enter the market, first find assets and issue them, but users cannot stay. If the liquidity in the secondary market is not resolved, the primary market will be in vain.

-The second layer, use task incentives such as transactions, pending orders, and sharing to support the creator ecology, and combine community recommendation rewards to solve user activity and identity.

- The third layer, with a more robust transaction protocol, provides professional users with price concessions, combined with better utilities based on the protocol layer to enhance the transaction experience. With the third layer, business data and processing tools such as orders and offers are completely open to partners through API and SDK, and further participate in the market cycle of shared liquidity.

This design organizes the deep coupling of the three technology stacks of aggregators, transaction incentives and tool data, and establishes a new architecture similar to DeFi mechanism and Web3 products. The intention at the product level is very clear, and it is a one-stop solution to the problems of NFT asset liquidity and platform user traffic. This product design path is different from OpenSea, Looksrare, and GEM's pure aggregator mode.

To be more precise, the aggregation market is not equal to the aggregator. If the aggregator is tool-oriented, there are only developers. However, the market platform must provide Launchpad, must have a transaction agreement that can support the business, and also requires an operation team to communicate with the community and products. Close collaboration.

11. A new round of challenger conjectures

In the next step, I am more concerned about two markets and one entrance. One is the next-generation comprehensive market, which is data-based and algorithm-driven. One is to verticalize the game market, and to segment transaction scenarios, specifically. The entrance refers to the wallet.

-Is there an algorithm recommendation market similar to Tiktok's distributed content? To ask more precisely, since the NFT market is not a centralized financial scene, but a gradually decentralized e-commerce-like full-category market.

-Will there be a completely decentralized NFT market driven by precise algorithm matching?

-Is the decentralized wallet on the mobile terminal an entrance to the NFT market? If this proposition is true, what are Imtoken and TokenPocket waiting for?

-In addition, are mobile encrypted asset management platforms and media platforms more active in participating?

- Existing major trading platforms come back and enter?

12. Progress and loss of public chain ecology

It can be said that the strong consensus foundation of Ethereum is the value anchor of today's NFT market. As for the so-called digital collections, I'd rather not talk about them.

NFT should not be just a market exclusive to Ethereum. Because there is no public chain that does not pay attention to the NFT ecology. But the loneliness outside of Ethereum surprised me a bit. At present, the biggest winner in the market is Solana. This ecology makes the Magic Eden trading platform and many NFT creation teams live well. NFT has given the Solana public chain more space for discourse. On this stage, future Meteverse and Web3 projects can be expected.

-Compared with the performance of Solana, there is a significant gap in the progress of several major Ethereum virtual machine ecosystems such as Polygon, BSC, and Avalance. Although they all let go of their harsh words, this is somewhat surprising.

-The NFT market and GameFi on BNBChain have a lot of room for imagination. In theory, Binance has a very good GameFi resource base. However, comparing the potential energy of Binance CEX and DeFi ecology back then, it is still far below the market expectations of most people. Although there are still many users and project parties participating, the transaction volume of star assets is far from rising. The only problem with the Binance ecology today is not that it is too big, and the mountain gate is already hanging high, but that there are too many things to do directly.

-Polygon. I think they missed the best opportunity to make efforts in the first half of last year, when their currency prices were in the limelight, they were too conservative. In the DeFi era, they got up by telling ecological stories. Their chance, or the next big story, may depend on their acquisition of the ZK Rollup zero-knowledge proof technology team.

-Filecoin. NFT requires the use of decentralized storage methods for media file storage, such as IPFS, Filecoin, and AR. After all, the Image element in the NFT metadata must be written into the decentralized storage address in the code. Image files in various formats will become larger and larger in the future, but it seems that Filecoin has not made good use of this grand narrative category. The circulation market value of the largest storage public chain has evaporated 95% in such an unbelievable manner last month.

-NEAR Protocol. I had roast duck once with their co-founder Illia Polosukhin. We call him Yilong. At that time, he just took a lot of money from big funds and was ambitious, but Mintbase supported by NEAR started very early, and has not seen more progress yet.

-Justin Sun also got in touch with NFT very early and invested heavily in artwork NFT. What I admire most about Justin is his ability to dare to toss. We drink until three in the morning in Singapore. He wants to create an NFT fund and also supports Tron's NFT trading platform, but how does the Tron public chain ecology drive NFT creators to join in?

- Polkdot Polkadot. In the fall of the year before last, I was fortunate to have a face-to-face conversation with Gavin Wood in a dining bar near Wudaokou, Tsinghua University. He was actually the earliest proposer of the Web3 concept. We had an issue on the trend of the Web3 technology stack. dialogue. He is an entrepreneur who is as happy as a child when I talk about technology among the big guys in the currency circle. He is also an active blockchain evangelist. He is also very optimistic about NFT. However, two years later, Polkadot has not highlighted a little right to speak in the NFT market that matches its status in the industry?

-Flow public chain, the creator of CryptoKitties and the creator of the ERC721 protocol, has been silent since NBATopSho reached its peak. Still, I hope GameFi is their opportunity.

13. The power of the community

At the NFT.NYC conference in New York in June, the atmosphere was much better than I expected. Although the cryptocurrency market continues to go bearish, it has not weakened the enthusiasm for NFT curation and Party activities. The sentiment here not only dilutes the hidden worry that bad things are about to happen, but also makes us temporarily forget that Bitcoin has fallen by 70% from its historical high, and that the complete collapse of LUNA and Three Arrows Capital has caused market consensus tragic destruction. In contrast, the Consensus Conference in Austin in May, the top summit of the blockchain industry that has been run by CoinDesk for many years, was a little deserted in comparison.

Today, the NFT community begins to move from online to offline. At more and more NFT gatherings, I have Punk, you have Ape Golden Monkey, they are the core members of the Azuki community, and they have also become a new identity that quickly cuts into topics and establishes connections, and it is easier to participate in this identity. NFT has become an encrypted business card. A person’s status as a well-known NFT holder in the Web3 world means that we heard the meaning of the legendary 1st district 1 server and the elder of the game guild in the Warcraft US server during the enlightenment period of online games. Yes, today NFT Whales And the NFT KOL on the social platform has a status that attracts NFT communities and platforms to compete.

The cultural attributes of NFT are very important. Community activity, member cohesion, and brand influence are necessary conditions for the success of the project. I also noticed that more and more people in China are organizing Mfer gatherings, and I can guess that many new NFT projects are being derived from this community. Many people expect its price to break through 10 ETH, but the price of Mfer has not risen, and the floor price of 1 to 4 ETH is fluctuating. But it gave more people the opportunity to participate.

14. Asian faces open their eyes

NFT has financial attributes, but there must be cultural differences in essence, and there must be regional preferences. The judgment of many investors on this difference was almost disproved last year. From the beginning of this year, this phenomenon was broken. NFT is no longer the only one in American culture. Asian stars, animation and many IPs have also joined in one after another.

- Sunflowers by Japanese modern artist Takashi Murakami

-The first Chinese emoticon package Lengtu series to enter the market

- Jay Chou's PhantaBear series

- Edison Chen's Nvlpe series

-Shawn Yue's Zoobie series

-Theirsverse led by Yi Nengjing.

I have met Yi Nengjing two or three times in Silicon Valley. She plans to integrate NFT brands with offline beauty products. I was amazed at how many people participated in her hands-on efforts. I think their holders will laugh once the market turns bullish.

This situation has just begun. Asian faces continue to appear on the NFT stage. I predict that in the next year, the top ten in the global NFT trading market, seven to eight will be occupied by Chinese overseas teams or Asian companies.

15. Towards a group of mature traders

When I introduced NFT to others last year, I had to struggle to talk about the boring vocabulary of non-homogeneity. For example, ERC721 is different from ERC20. Metadata is stored in JSON files, and there are substantial differences between on-chain and off-chain. Now no one cares. After the popularity of the Internet, no one asked where HTTP and URL are. For one thing, when the number of participants increases, the threshold of cognition disappears, such as the window paper will be broken as soon as it is rubbed.

It is not difficult to find the easiest way to track the floor price of a blue-chip NFT with appropriate psychological price expectations. This is the same as looking at the price fluctuation trends of BTC and ETH, starting from actual purchases and pending orders.

To communicate with active players, enter their communities, and attend their offline parties. Today's NFT active players are very good at using a lot of tools. They will tell you:

-Freemint is hot

-How to save Gas Fee

-Where to go for listing, the shipping speed is fast

-What tool to use to sweep the goods with one click Sweep

-How to identify the Rarity in a collection

- How to track Whales address

- Who to follow on Twitter

-Which Youtubers can subscribe

-Which characteristics of NFT websites may be phishing scams

These problems are far from being solved by just one OpenSea. Whether the market is mature, my answer is no. But users are getting more and more mature. If you don't answer at least five of the above questions, you're not getting started yet.