ARE NFTS DEAD?

All right, so let's talk about if NFTs are dying or not. This is really an NFT NYC recap coming back from it last week. First and foremost, my name is Eric Siu, creator of Leveling Up Heroes, which is a marketing NFT designed to help you just get better at marketing. So let's get into it real quick, just looking at the trend lines. So let's take a look at Google Trends, and we can see in the last 5 years NFTs really started taking off, uh, really around 2021 or so, but then it just really shot up. You can see here in January or so of 2022, that's kind of the high point, right? January 16th, 2022 worldwide. And you can see from then it's been kind of on the decline and seems like it's continuing to go down, but it's starting to smooth out a little bit here as of this recording. Now, the other thing we want to take a look at is trend lines. So if we take a look at trend lines, we're using nansen.ai. And we can see that the year-to-date volume is about 7 million ETH and the 30-day volume, 581K ETH. It's down 58%, um, month on month now. And you can see over here, the high point was May. There's a ton of volume and, um, you know, it's kind of been dwindling since then right now. Well, last week, one of the biggest NFT conferences happened and, uh, NFT NYC, 1,500 speakers or something like that in New York. And yet people from around the world getting together. And, you know, aside from looking at the, the quantitative data, which I just showed you, trend lines and that type of stuff, also looking, taking a look at the qualitative, right? Like, what is the general sentiment? What's the general feeling around all this stuff? And so I went to the event and what I wanted to evaluate is how people were really feeling at the end of the day. And what I can say is a couple of developments. I'll share a couple of stories to give you a sense of where things are going. But before we do, don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button if you are enjoying this so far. And let's get to it. So one thing's— first things first, my friend sold his company for about $200 million, sold a company called ProfitWell for about $200 million. His name is Patrick Campbell, and this is public information. You can go search for the transaction. He came from Puerto Rico just to New York for ApeFest, and he went for 2 days. And, um, he came to ApeFest and we met up. We, we, you know, we both worked in software as a service, and so We're both business operators. And, you know, we're just talking about how excited we are about the space. And, you know, did we talk about the down market at all? Not really. Did we talk about how excited we are and, you know, who we're excited to see at these events? For example, Eminem and Snoop Dogg, they performed at one of the ApeFest days, and each day just had the headliners, right? Headliners on headliners. So I just think, you know, from that perspective, the general sentiment from 2 business operators is pretty good. And, you know, people were there to talk about building things for the future, right? And so the other thing is I went to a handful of events and I wanted to gauge the sentiment there. And I actually did an event as well. So we hosted a dinner and you can see on my screen over here, this is a dinner that we did and cool people at the dinner. So Matt Stefanina, you know, he's a DJ. We had BT over here. He's also a DJ and then founder of 8chan. Nicole, High Street founder over here, Lily, who runs like an AI crypto fund, and then founders of The Crillist, you know, Brett Malinowski. So a lot of great people. I mean, we have Pierina from Flicky Gang, Metatope over here, Rachel's Challenge. So Jordan from Metatope. And then, so anyway, these are just a couple of names, right? And, you know, The fact that you have people here breaking bread, talking about how excited we are about the future, that's a big signal because that— what happens in a down market is it flushes out all of the kind of short-term people that are focused on money grabs, and it really keeps the people in that are focused on building for the future. So you have founders, kind of creators that are building for the future from a brand perspective, but you also have engineers, really looking at the engineers that are continuing to build over time. And you can look at on-chain data to see like which developers are still kind of pushing code, right? And that's a really positive signal for the long term. So this is a dinner that we did. And afterwards, we actually ended up going to a Sandbox event where Tiesto was spinning. And Tiesto, world-class DJ, and everyone was just kind of standing around. But more so, they were talking to each other about different— I can see people were talking to each other in the crowd, right? Talking to each other about what they're excited about, what they're planning to build. And really, you know, maybe there's some jokes about the down market, about how things are tough right now. But, you know, when you go to things like this, when you look at trend lines, trend lines might show that things are not going so well. But when you look at some of the qualitative feedback, the qualitative sentiment, That looks really good. And when you look at the qualitative— or sorry, the quantitative data around developers and engineers continuing to build, that's a very bullish signal for the long term. I went to ApeFest myself. So let me see if I can pull up some more pictures here. This is my little Instagram. We did a Golden DAO event. So this is Andrew Yang. So Golden DAO is more about, you know, AAPI initiatives. And I'm happy to support that. Did a karaoke with the team afterwards. That was fun. We did a little happy hour here as well. And you can see a little Littles thing in the background. So we did that. And then this is us at Sandbox. So Will from the Littles, Pierina from Flicky Gang, and then Nicole from ApeGen. And, you know, this ApeFest event, by the way, the way this was done was, it was levels above how it was done last year. So they've really leveled up their production quality. This is GoldenDAO over here. And then this is a little ring that they gave. And there's a little party that my friend Gianni did, right? And so, and this is the Littles over here. So, and this is the kind of what's going on. So, oh, actually I realized my screen's not even up right now. Let me pull this up over here. So this is going in reverse now. So this is the Littles, little party my friend Gianni did, GoldenDAO ring, GoldenDAO, ApeFest. And then this is, these are the people that I mentioned. And then this is the happy hour that we did. And then hanging out with, with Andrew Yang, right? So all of this to say is that, you know, if people, if it was like everything was falling apart and NFTs were dying, then people probably wouldn't be going to this event. People wouldn't be talking about building. But even if NFTs as these profile pictures, as these JPEGs are, that's like, that's an on-ramp into NFTs, right? Long-term, what really matters for NFTs is we're going to be NFTing our health records. Our diplomas, a lot of our data will be— they're gonna be soulbound tokens, right? So these are, you know, Vitalik talked about rolling out soulbound tokens. So you can basically send someone a diploma and they can't, they can't move it around, but it is on the blockchain. Like, you can see over time, like, what they've actually accomplished. And that's gonna be a lot more legit versus, you know, having to kind of dig around and look around on LinkedIn. You can actually see someone's credentials, for better or worse. So I think that's very interesting. Other than that, I think the— our event, lessons learned, when you have a really big event like NFT NYC, 1,500 speakers and a lot of people kind of descending on New York, it's probably better to partner up on an event instead. And I had a lot of opportunities to partner up with other people. When we did the VeeCon event, we had like 90 or 100 people roll through, and then our LA event, like 60 to 70 people roll through. So it was very good attendance rate, about 75% or so. In this case, our attendance rate was significantly lower. I'd say maybe about 20 to 25% or so. Because A, it was raining, and then B, New York's so spread out, right? So I think partnering up with other groups, that's probably a good move, and bringing awareness and cross-promoting, that's probably the move. And what else would I say? I would say the, the event itself, that would actually cause me to be a little more bearish on NFTs in general, right? So, and this is only the second time in, in less than 12 months really that NFT NYC has done this. So I think they're gonna get better, but Just having 1,500 speakers that are not vetted and they're kind of, you know, talking about whatever they want on stage, you know, that kind of brings the quality down, right? And I understand for them, you know, maybe they're trying to create some type of mainstream activity where the idea is for each speaker they're bringing maybe 10 to 15 people with them. So when you multiply that, that could be like 15,000 to 18,000 people or so kind of coming to New York and people doing business that way. Like, that's a cool way to get a conference going and maybe they can iterate on that. But I would just say that the quality of the conference itself was not good. So a lot of people I know did not actually go to the conference and they didn't speak at the conference. Instead, they went to all the satellite events. Right. So that's kind of the hack with, with NFT NYC, at least for right now. I'm hoping they'll do a better job of vetting people long term and maybe not letting as many speakers come, because when you look at the stage, maybe there was— of all the kind of seats available, maybe it was like 10 to 15% at times. And maybe when you have a headline speaker come in, it maybe fills up. But I would just say, you know, if you're going to go to these things, pay attention to satellite events. And if there's any kind of— if you have a weird feeling, right, if it feels like a— like the event is maybe not the quality that you expect it would be, you're probably right. I stopped in for a little bit just to walk around and get a sense for the vibe. And I knew it wasn't the vibe for me, right? Because it was a lot— it was still people talking about short-term stuff and people that still can't see Um, they're not looking at things from a long-term perspective, right? So I think that's, that's not necessarily wrong. It's just not the way I think. And, um, you know, that's not the way I prefer to think. So anyway, short answer is, are NFTs dead? No. NFT NYC worth going to? Um, it's worth going when the event is happening. I would say as of right now, I would probably just, um, you know, avoid the event, uh, itself. Um, but I do think they'll get better, right? Like, we'll see what happens. But as of right now, I'm probably a hard pass on the event. So Hopefully this helps. Please don't forget to hit the like button, the subscribe button, leave a comment if you agree, disagree with me. Were you actually at NFT NYC? And we'll catch you later.