Despite the cryptocurrency, NFT enthusiasts are keeping the party going
The crypto market has crashed. Trade in digital art is down. But for the world’s largest gathering of NFT enthusiasts, the party is raging harder than ever.
More than 15,000 people are expected to gather in Times Square this week for NFT.NYC, a conference dedicated to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a technology that has been compared to digital certificates of authenticity and which enthusiasts highlight as the future of everything from art and collectibles for the internet itself. Strengthened by soaring cryptocurrencies, NFTs became a $ 40 billion market last year.
And as a digital movement built on overwhelming positivity, the NFT community showed few signs of letting the latest market problems shake trust.
“It’s a construction market,” said Travis Wright, co-host of the Bad Crypto podcast and one of the MCs on the event’s main stage on Tuesday at Radio City Music Hall. The conference leased the legendary theater with the help of sponsors such as Coinbase, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, which recently announced that it was laying off around 1,100 employees, about 18% of employees.
“Did you feel at this conference that this is somehow tough right now?” said Joel Comm, Wright’s podcast partner and co-MC. “No, this is great stuff.”
Inside the nearby Marriott Marquis, where the conference has rented six floors, crowds packed the hallways, flanked by vendors who took up almost all available floor space. Many in the crowd, mostly men from their teens to their late 30s, were in a perpetual state of presenting their idea of how they could improve what they all seem to agree is the future of art and digital collectibles.
The NFT market grew slowly for several years and then exploded in 2021. But prices for some NFTs have dropped dramatically, and the number of accounts trading in NFTs has finally declined this year.
Meanwhile, the broader crypto market has also fallen significantly. Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that serves as the backbone of most NFT and other Web3.0 projects, is now worth somewhere between a third and a quarter of what it was for most of the past year.
But the attendance at NFT.NYC is estimated by the event’s organizer to triple from the last meeting in November. Not deterred by the “crypto winter,” participants paid between $ 599 and $ 1,999 for tickets, then waited in queues that lined the block to enter the Marriott.
And many of the participants who spoke to NBC News offered a mixture of optimism and inevitability around NFT technology. Many people still see it as early days for NFTs, mature for people to experiment with their own projects.
David Angelo, who along with three friends started an NFT art project called Naughty Giraffes, a collection of 10,000 giraffe cartoons, said he has long-term faith in the technology.
“Not everyone is going to make it,” said Angelo, who was wearing a giraffe costume at the conference. “Not everyone will be able to come to the promised land, which may be longer than we all hope and expect.”
Like many participants, Angelo, an early crypto-adopter, said that he personally managed the crypto winter well and that he saw it as an investment opportunity rather than a sign that the NFT market had reached its peak. But he acknowledged that those who had just invested in the space before the crash could be left in the bag.
He is not alone in his long-term optimism. Despite the crash, venture capitalists continue to invest in NFT and other Web 3.0 companies.
FalconX, a platform for trading digital assets, was valued at $ 8 billion in a new round of financing, the company said on Wednesday. Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace launched in 2021, raised an additional $ 130 million. And Meta published an NFT-for-beginners guide on Wednesday, part of the company’s broader efforts to convince users that it is home to virtual worlds.
Some also see real applications. Jeanne Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Danvas, a company that plans to sell screens as screens for digital art, told NFT.NYC that art galleries that had invested heavily in NFTs are still embracing that market despite the downturn.
“Everyone knew winter was coming,” she said. “It came a little faster than some estimated, but no one went into 2022 and thought it would not be a period of change.”
“There are very few institutional museums out there that respond immediately to trends. That’s just not what a museum in general is about, says Anderson.
Still, she said she was lucky to receive $ 7 million in financing for her company in December, just before the crash.
“It would be tough to start your fundraiser right now,” she said. “I think I feel lucky to have raised money when we did.”
NFT skeptics continue to express concern about society’s propensity to elevate and at times fudge the details. At one point in a Marriott hallway, a security guard cleared the way for what appeared to be rapper Snoop Dogg, who sells branded NFTs.
Only on closer inspection did it become clear that the man was an imitator employee of an NFT company, and that his official conference mark was “Doop Snogg”.
