The masters of the metaverse – thousands of CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, artists and hackers, sharp-eyed ideals and profit-hungry speculators – came to Manhattan last week, looking for a look. glimpse into the future.
Officially, they were here for NFT.NYC, a conference devoted to immutable tokens, or NFT, the blockchain-based collection that changed the crypto and art worlds for the year. now on. Organizers said the conference, now in its third year, drew a record crowd of 5,000 people, plus a 3,000 waiting list.
Every day, they come to boards with titles like “Major Blockchain Game” and “Fintech and NFTs: Risk and Regulation”.
But the real action happened at night, during an informal party — a weeklong jaunt of boom-time excitement that some attendees jokingly called “Crypto Coachella.”
It’s an up-and-coming party for the NFT community, which was born online and only recently started experimenting with offline fun. On Sunday, the Bored Ape Yacht Club – an elite NFT group whose members own an insanely expensive animated series of monkeys – threw a rager aboard an actual yacht on the Hudson River. On Monday, partygoers headed to VR World in Midtown for a party led by an NFT collector named Seedphrase, who appeared on stage in a CryptoPunk helmet that lit up the stage. And on Tuesday, entrepreneurs rubbed elbows with drag queens at a downtown party hosted by Playboy to promote the magazine’s new NFT “Rabbitars” collection.
It’s a more diverse group than one might think, mainly due to the presence of so many artists and musicians among crypto investors, investors annoyed with FOMO and in line with the industry. company. Many NFT collectors know each other only from Twitter threads and Discord chats, and a few use their real names or photos online, opting instead for pseudonyms and cartoon avatars. At first, they spent a lot of time figuring out who they might know as CoolCat43 or ApeChad690 and whether the guy dressed as CryptoPunk #3706 actually owned CryptoPunk #3706. (He did.)
They also found that not all customs of the online NFT world translate well to the meat space. T-shirts emblazoned with chants like “Wagmi” (we will all succeed) drew some confused looks from passersby. One morning, a group of NFT fans in Times Square struggled to start the song “gm, New York” — “gm” is the traditional Twitter greeting of the converted cryptocurrency. In the end, even Elmo looked embarrassed.
And forget about trying to explain to the uninitiated what an NFT conference is or why you’re flying across the country to attend it. I overheard a number of attempts, mostly with polite waiters and bartenders, almost always stopping somewhere around the word “origin”. The real answer for some of them – “we buy digital tokens that correspond to JPEG because digital tokens that correspond to JPEG sometimes become extremely valuable and they I’m here because we want to find out which digital tokens correspond to the next JPEG that will become incredibly valuable so we can buy them and retire early” – often raises more questions than answer.
I’m a fan of NFTs, but in some ways they’re great for an IRL gathering. Like cryptocurrencies themselves, they are a purely digital phenomenon – a technology that allows anyone to buy and sell invisible pieces of the Internet as if they were physical objects, whether it be a transaction. NBA featured videos or auctions of digital art collections. And between the cramped element of some NFT subgroups and the literal prevalence of children among the NFT elite, it’s a scene that could benefit from a little more occultism.
By Monday night, the V.I.P. Gathering at a rooftop reception of the Edison Hotel seems to have solved the problem. Unmasking and flagging down trays of sliders and risotto balls, they chat about their project and talk about how discovering the NFT has changed their lives.
Mostly, they seem grateful to be in each other’s company.
“I’ve met a lot of people online over the past year, and they’re all here,” said Keith Soljacich, Chicago-based advertising executive. “I’m with my people and I don’t need to withhold or translate.”
Jessica Ewud, an NFT artist with the stage name Ragzy, said she thinks the conference is like a coming-out party for the indelible token.
“It’s just all the worlds coming together – art, technology – and we’re celebrating the good times of this booming industry,” she said.
“For me, this is Woodstock,” said Kenn Bosak, a Philadelphia-based NFT collector who has a small facial tattoo that turns out, under close examination, to be the letters N-F-T. (“I achieved it the day I became a millionaire,” he explains.)
Woodstock – signifying the mainstream of a youthful counterculture – is indeed a fitting comparison to an assemblage like NFT.NYC, albeit on a different scale. The crypto business is booming, with Bitcoin and Ethereum prices near all-time highs and new money pouring in. Major corporations are co-opting the language and aesthetics of crypto to market themselves to young customers, and celebrities are promoting their own crypto exchanges and NFTs. And while there are still many crypto skeptics, including by US regulators, the industry’s reputation as a haven for crime and tax fraud is fading. Today, the emerging view seems to be that cryptocurrencies are great – something that even the most sincere of believers did not dispute until recently.
I assume much of this shift is due to the cross-attractiveness of NFTs, which have turned what people don’t understand (cryptocurrency) into things they already do (fan merchandise and loot). high end), and this has drawn everyone from Coca-Cola to Martha Stewart to dip their feet in. More than $10 billion in NFTs were sold last quarter, up 700% from the previous quarter’s sales, according to DappRadar, a company that tracks blockchain sales.
Of course, such growth will create a bubble and many crypto enthusiasts will admit that the NFT market is one. The hype surrounding big, expensive NFTs – like Beeple’s $69 million sale earlier this year – has flooded the market with scammers and opportunists trying to make a quick buck. fast. And while it’s entirely possible that the NFT will play some role in the future of art, it’s hard to argue frankly whether a painting of the rock should sell for $1.3 million or so. The fair market value of the New York Times is more than $500,000. (Though, believe me, I tried.)
There are a few warning voices at NFT.NYC, including Gary Vaynerchuk, the popular social media marketer and founder of VaynerMedia. Mr. Vaynerchuk, who has his own line of NFTs “VeeFriends”, said in his keynote on Tuesday that he was worried that investors jumped into the NFT recklessly and they could suffer losses. serious if the market crashes.
Mr. Vaynerchuk said: “90% of people in our space are in business to earn a bag. “I’m extremely worried about people betting money they can’t afford.”
But today’s smart investors don’t buy seven-figure JPEGs. In fact, many of them are looking entirely at the past NFT artworks, towards a new and glorious future, they believe that the whole NFT phenomenon is ultimately pointing us towards prior to.
The phenomenon is “Web3” (ooh, ahh), a flashy, new industry term for a new kind of decentralized internet service that doesn’t run on massive servers owned by major Valley corporations. Silicon like Google and Facebook, but on public blockchains, with a token-based reward system that allows users to profit from their online activities.
Web3 is part of a picture of the future that Mark Zuckerberg painted last month, when he announced that Facebook was changing its name to Meta and focusing on creating immersive digital experiences and virtual reality games. lifelike. But the vision goes beyond social media or VR. Many young crypto entrepreneurs today are looking to tear down the entire technological foundation of the modern world and rebuild it piece by piece on the blockchain.
If they are successful, one day your electronic health record will be an NFT, which you will be able to seamlessly transport between doctors. The song of your favorite musician? That would also be the NFT, presumably attached to a smart contract that allows you to share their future royalties. Your kid’s Fortnite skin? NFT or something like that and she should be able to transfer them from game to game.
Haven’t had much of this vision yet, but it’s interesting to think about. And crypto innovators are saving on the promise of a new blank canvas.
Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Paradigm, a crypto-focused investment firm, said: “This is what I’m most excited about about crypto since Ethereum launched in 2015. “Suddenly , the total range of people interested in cryptocurrency has expanded by 10. It goes beyond digital money and beyond a new financial system. Cryptocurrencies are also culture now. “