Some NFT influencers want you to ignore the hype

When he started a YouTube channel in 2019, Jesse Hall decided not to tell his wife and children until he had a small following. Within a few weeks, he had a few hundred people subscribing to his coding training – a success, in his mind. But it was not until he began exploring NFTs that the audience exploded, growing rapidly from thousands of subscribers to hundreds of thousands.

“I’m very introverted by nature, and this has really brought me more out of my shell than I’ve ever been,” Hall said. “And I’ve learned that I really enjoy teaching.”

The crypto space tends to be dominated by enthusiastic boosters who promise great returns to anyone who is knowledgeable enough to buy in – even when the headlines are filled with stories of crash after crash. But look past the hype, and you may also find a contingent of creators offering something rare: practical knowledge and reasonable expectations of newcomers to the room.

“I honestly think we’re in a bubble,” said Aprilynne Alter, another NFT YouTuber and influencer. “And I hope it cracks soon, so we can stop paying attention to ‘finance bros’ who just want to make money.”

Hall and Alter work hard not to be one of them the NFT creators. In fact, they are concerned that people who hyper up profits are making it harder for NFTs to be taken seriously as a new technology for trade and commerce. Alter believes these videos are part of the reason why ordinary people view NFTs and cryptocurrencies as a fad.

Instead, Hall and Alter focus on explaining how their viewers can create, build and grow their own NFT collections. They hope to show that technology behind NFTs can be transformative – as long as people who create NFT content are willing to give up the flashy “get rich quick” marketing and settle for content that actually teaches people how the blockchain, cryptocurrency, and ledger really work.

“I always ask myself, what can we do to help NFTs get to the point where when someone says NFT, they think, ‘My serious documents could be an NFT,'” Hall said. “And they want to be safer. as NFTs. ”

Hall and Alter make NFT guides for a general audience – people with little knowledge of coding who want to shape their own collections. They also make videos on how to create communities around NFT collections and sell NFTs. In Hall’s case, his knowledge comes from trying to figure it all out for himself.

“I actually created an NFT collection before I even bought one,” Hall said. ‘It’s like I did everything backwards. I kind of jumped headlong into this whole thing. “

This approach, Hall claims, makes it clear that he does not claim to be an expert on anything. Hall, just like everyone else, tries to learn as much as he can about NFTs and will make mistakes along the way.

Alter has even less coding experience than Hall and has a similar approach to his videos. She has realized that this is one of the reasons why people keep coming back to her content.

“I saw a lot of comments that said I was the first person to explain NFTs without any jargon,” Alter said. “They liked the fact that I was not a coder or an engineer.”

It was videos like these that enabled Max Houser, a software engineer from Seattle, to create his first NFT collection ever in 2021. Houser saw that children as young as 13 years old made and sold NFTs, and decided to try to figure it out for yourself. After looking through some tutorials, he finally found a video that explained every step of the NFT manufacturing process and was able to create several NFT collections, including those to support pediatric oncology research. He is also a blockchain engineer now, thanks to the online tutorials he looked at.

“It was an invaluable collision,” Houser said. “If I had not gone that way, I do not know if I would have done this professionally.”

Hall and Alter say that there are other complications they need to be aware of when making NFT videos. NFT transactions can be expensive, so Hall uses the Polygon blockchain in training – which has usually been cheaper to use than Ethereum – so viewers don’t have to spend a fortune to keep up. And Alter says that it is difficult to accept sponsorship from crypto companies, without falling into the same traps around the NFT hype that she warns again.

“I want the sponsor to be presented as an example of what a good NFT collection can look like,” Alter said. “But I do not want to tell people to buy it.”

All disclaimers and warnings in the creators’ videos cannot prevent these instructions from becoming irrelevant or simply incorrect. Blockchain technology and the services around it are evolving rapidly, so Hall often has to update disclaimers during his videos to let people know that his instructions are out of date.

“The first video I posted there, the one that went viral, became irrelevant the day after I posted it,” Hall said.

The first video now has an updated description and an attached comment that tells viewers that the procedure may be different for them. But these changes are just like software updates, according to Hall; they mean that cryptocurrency and NFT space will be better.

“We know there is so much about technology that is in its infancy, and there is going to be growing pains,” Hall said. “But we have to ask where we need to go instead of complaining about where we are now.”

Correction 7 June at 15.00 ET: an earlier version of this story misspelled the surnames of Aprilynne Alter and Max Houser.