Dear Bankless Nation,
Some people have been saying the NFT ecosystem was ripe for a major drawdown for months now.
Of course, who can say for sure what will happen from here or the full reality of how we’ve actually arrived here.
But it is interesting to contrast these drawdown projections with the fact that we’re currently amid one of the most important weeks for NFTs ever.
Maybe I’m wrong. But my current impression? The show’s just beginning. And I’m just enthralled that the possibilities ahead can be so empowering for so many.
-WMP
NFT Ecosystem Carrying the Day
We’re halfway through the week and yet so many developments have already happened therein that there’s a case to be made this was one of the biggest weeks for NFTs to date.
That’s a bold assertion, of course, but there are tectonic shifts happening all around this ecosystem right now and mountains are rising up before our very eyes. Just in the span of the last 3½ days, we’ve seen:
- Larva Labs launch Meebits, a metaverse avatars project. LL are titans in the NFT ecosystem for creating CryptoPunks, which inspired the ERC-721 standard and has gone on to become the space’s bellwether collectibles project. Now, the team’s back at it again with Meebits, 3D voxel models that holders can use as avatars in the metaverse. In a matter of days, trading volume has exploded around the NFTs as people have excitedly rallied to the project as a step forward for LL and the metaverse.
- E-commerce powerhouse eBay announce its leadership was researching avenues for supporting NFTs. "We're exploring opportunities on how we can enable [NFTs] on eBay in an easy way," CEO Jamie Iannone told CNBC. For context, eBay’s U.S. marketplace facilitated nearly $40B worth of sales last year. This is what the beginnings of major mainstream adoption looks like.
- Uniswap V3 launch, and with it arriving a new NFT-centric paradigm around liquidity provisioning — something that’s fundamental to DeFi — in DeFi’s top trading protocol. Simply put, V3 liquidity provider (LP) positions are represented as NFTs as opposed to the fungible ERC-20 tokens. This is going to lead to tons more financialization around NFTs and lots of DeFi projects embracing them going forward. The NFT era of DeFi has arrived, in other words.
- Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk launch VeeFriends, a project centered around access NFTs that can be used to unlock special experiences, gifts, and admission to VeeCon, Vaynerchuk’s upcoming super-conference. This flagship effort will help pave the way for many more access NFT projects to come, and undoubtedly they will come because the possibilities for NFTs as access are endless.
These developments, just a snapshot from the first half of this week, show the NFT ecosystem isn’t slowing down — it’s picking up steam.
If you’re not excited about NFTs at this point, then you’re not paying attention. There’s lots more work to do ahead, sure, but the best and brightest among us have never been more up for the task. Let’s keep doing great work, together.
Action steps
- 📺 Watch “VeeFriends with GaryVee” by Bankless