NESTRoundtable 27: NFT Opportunities in 2023

Participants:

Host

NEST Protocol
IPollo
WhaleCoin Talk

Guest

Legion, ManesLAB director
Ariel, EtherPOAP ambassador
Michael Cameron, CEO of Game Space
Peter, Manager of Legal Operations at EverRise Inc.
Enrique, Public Relations Lead at EverRise Inc.
Zoey, Seer ambassador
Kuku, IMOV speaker
TheKeiron, Co-founder and Developer of MurAll

Conference recording

https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1YpKkgdgDqAKj?s=20

Highlights of the Space

Woody: The NFT and metaverse market is hot recently because of Blur as a new challenger of OpenSea, and it has already got a much higher trading volume than OpenSea currently.

What do you think of the Bitcoin NFT?

Peter: That is super interesting, whether it represents an opportunity depends on the same factors as Ethereum NFT, it will depend on the community and the intrinsic value. What I think is most interesting about Bitcoin NFT is their application to anti-censorship to the extent that Bitcoin does become a permanent form of currency. It’s very interesting to be able to inscribe images or text on those NFTs. To me, it’s more interesting as a means of preserving certain historical texts than certain pieces of art. You know, various projects are racing to inscribe images on it, and certain Bitcoins are upset about that. But in my view, it’s more interesting as it’s almost like writing on a Dollar Bill, but. Dollar Bill cannot be destroyed. So, for me, the most interesting thing about Bitcoin NFT is its durability and censorship resistance.

Ariel: From a theoretical side, what I know is non-fungible tokens are most widely known as Ethereum-based tokens. But lately, the Bitcoin NFTs are also used inscriptions to work. The original theory aims to give individual identities allowing them to be checked transferred and inbuilt with meanings. So, it is definitely a great opportunity to follow.

TheKeiron: It’s been mentioned that it’s kind of like a controversial subject that on the one hand, it’s introducing new use cases to the Bitcoin ecosystem. They are effectively divided between the financial aspect that Bitcoin is money and the others who kind of value the innovation aspect of Bitcoin. It is kind of pushing boundaries and maybe it shouldn’t be just money, it can do something else, then why shouldn’t it? So, I have two minds by myself. As a programmer, I was kind of enamored by the concept of this unstoppable code that once you deploy it, there’s nothing to alter or change what it does. Nobody can stop it, that was something really cool that didn’t exist prior to anything in the Tech space until the invention. But it had a restriction on what you could make on it.

Kuku: It definitely introduced another use case to the Bitcoin ecosystem and we know that’s the place where the institutions and the retail investors are heavily invested and that’s something that we take as a reference to determine where the crypto market is going to shift towards is acting a most importantly as a store of value for the entire crypto market. The Blur effect definitely will be there because there’s a uniqueness of the Bitcoin NFT is that the Bitcoin NFT can only be traded on the Bitcoin blockchain. So if you want a part of it or if you want the Bitcoin NFT to see or explore a wide range of digital assets. When we’re talking about the NFT, we’re not only talking about gaming sitting at currently at seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue, we talking about virtual real estate, music, entertainment identity, social tokens, etc. so it will be very interesting to see where Bitcoin are and how Bitcoin develops the NFTs.

Peter: I have a short-term view and a long-term view of this. Short term, I think the same thing will happen with any hyped situation. Money will chase over here. A lot of people spend money on this. Some people will get liquidity, some people will lose money. But I do think of Bitcoin as something that’s going to be around for a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years. And in 500 years nobody is going to care what animal is drawn on what Satoshi, it’s still going to have fungible power as money. If Bitcoin is all that, I believe it’s not going anywhere no matter what you draw on it. So, I’m most interested in those things that are going to be durable and interesting for centuries.

Whale Coin Talk: There is hype because it’s so early on, people will probably just speculate on the artistic value. But I think Peter brings out a really good point, if you’re drawing something on dollar, it’s still a dollar.

Legion: I believe there is short-term profit, but for the long term, I didn’t think it may work hard eventually because it is very, very early.

Enrique: It is too early to say if there are a bunch of new opportunities People might say this is something that could be fun. Others are just rushing in because they want to be the first.

What do you think of Blur and its impact on the NFT market?

Peter: My view is not negative or positive, but you just have to take Blur for what they say. It’s the marketplace for professional traders, it executes more trades faster and makes more money. So, the fact is I would expect most of us here in this room to be not professional traders. I’m not good enough to do it as it takes a lot of passion and mathematical ability and so at the end of the day, their model is to attract people who are very good at extracting liquidity. And they would say oh well that actually is a market-making service for NFT projects and that’s true to an extent. But that market making comes with a price and in my view that price ultimately gets paid by people who are not so good at trading, who get caught up in the hype, who get caught up following. Blur is not going away. Blur will continue to be popular because people like to gamble and people like to throw their money at things that are going up. And there will always be professional traders who are able to catch that wave and take some money out of the system. Is it good for the space? How are we defining the space? Is it people with algorithms and mathematical abilities that can execute trades quickly, or is it a world of artistic creativity and self-custody and togetherness and community? I don’t think Blur serves those values all that well, but it certainly serves the values of quick trading and algorithmic ability. So, to be honest, I guess negative would be where I trend in my opinion.

TheKeiron: It is interesting that they have tried to effectively gamify NFT marketplaces. And, you know, having that distribution of rewards in seasons is kind of ensuring that it has a constant interest in participation. At the same time, it also makes the question that what happens when those seasons end. People are getting rewarded for them that effectively loyal to the token. People enjoy selling their NFTs for profit, but obviously, the effect of this gamification of it is that is driving trading and stuff like that. So, it’s kind of artificially pushing, you know, a volume and price of certain things. On the flip side of that, you could say that it’s pushing eyes to the space in general because of its volume and people making money from it and incentivizing people to take notice, which in turn introduces new people into the space. It’s like a double-edged sword.

Kuku: I would like to talk about two aspects of it, a positive impact and a negative impact. I think the positives basically rely more upon money-making opportunities. You can earn money in the short term based on how fast you can transact and how fast you can understand things. So, you don’t have to wait long term in order to make money. But whether a particular asset has been overinflated in terms of value. That could be a good idea for the creators of the NFT to get good support or a good start in their NFT careers. And talking about the negative aspect is something a blur basically overshadows some of the undervalued NFTs in the sense that we have not explored them to the point wherein they can contribute massively and can attract a massive number of people over to the crypto side.

Ariel: Blur does not have a trading fee and enforces a 0.5% minimum to create a royalty. Blur has quickly established itself as a primary trading platform since its October launch and Blur encouraged traders to pay royalties by using airdrops. We can define Blur as a well-designed marketplace and a market aggregator that offers advanced analytics excellent portfolio management capabilities and the ability to compare multiple markets. And I think such capabilities make the marketplace increasingly preferred by professionals and traders from its speed to its analytical features, lack of gas fees, and other advantages.

Enrique: The way that they got into the market was completely disrupted and was completely brilliant.

Michael: Blur has really captured quite a niche market, they’re trending a lot recently and they have a lot of news coming out, they really captured the whales. I’ve seen more whale accounts come back. So, I think they definitely captured a really interesting angle of the market.

Legion: Blur provides rewards to liquidity providers, so it is slowly changing the whole NFT market. And what I see is in the future, more whales or many risky traders would try to provide the liquid for the project and try to be a personal or a small marketing maker for the NFT project.

How do you see the market trend of NFTs this year and why?

Kuku: I can predict that the future with the certainty that the growth can be found massively based on 2021 and 2022.

Ariel: After experiencing 2021, with approximately 1.5 million NFT sales, the NFT market faced myriad challenges in 2022. On the other hand, 2022 was also a year with some substantial innovations and progress toward the future of web3. In my opinion, there could be three potential trends in 2023. First is artificial intelligence. The second is NFT ticketing. Last is NFT rebrand for the mass market.

Peter: The NFT will really take off when they stop getting called NFTs.

TheKeiron: This year we are going to see more maturity in the NFT space. This time around, we will also see a lot more interesting use for it.

Michael: The users have to understand the difference between a PFP and the game NFT and until that happens, I don’t see that gamify is really going to have a strong presence. So, I think a big shift needs to happen.

Zoey: The market has been very unstable and unpredictable, with some NFTs selling for millions of dollars and others a fall. One potential reason for the popularity of NFT is the rise of online communities and social media, so which have created a new opportunity for artists and creators to showcase their work and connect with their fans. But overall, it is difficult to predict the NFT market.

What kind of NFT opportunities you’ll suggest to the audiences?

Kuku: If we look back, it all comes down to one thing which is new investors, new people exploring the potential of these NFTs, I mean my suggestion basically lies in whether you are an artist or the use case side of the NFTs or if you want to follow the hype, do your own research.

TheKeiron: Basically, everything down to the kind of core concepts of what has been enabled. They didn’t exist prior to somethings kind of invention. So, in the case of NFTs, the main thing that it brought up is digital ownership that individual can own a unique and non-replicable digital asset, and obviously, that’s revolutionized the way that we think about digital content in general and changing it to be something as valuable as physical assets.

Zoey: From my perspective, there are three top trends of NFT to look out for in 2023. The first one would be decentralized finance. The second is gaming NFT. Last is music NFT.

Peter: I think we really have to divorce ourselves from the idea that they’re an investment. That’s going to make us a lot of money. In my view, the best reason to buy an NFT is that you are engaged directly with its creator. The best opportunity for all of us is to seek out creators that we can engage with on a one-to-one level.