Despite crypto crash, NFT enthusiasts keep the party going
The crypto market has crashed. Trading in digital art is down. But for the world’s largest gathering of NFT enthusiasts, the party rages harder than ever.
More than 15,000 people are expected to gather in Times Square this week for NFT.NYC, a conference devoted to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a technology that has been compared to digital certificates of authenticity and that enthusiasts tout as the future of everything from art and collectibles to the internet itself. Buoyed by skyrocketing crypto prices, 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 woes shake its confidence.
“It’s a construction market,” said Travis Wright, a co-host of the Bad Crypto podcast and one of the MCs on the event’s keynote stage on Tuesday at Radio City Music Hall. The conference rented the legendary theater with the help of sponsors such as Coinbase, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, which recently announced that it is laying off about 1,100 employees, about 18% of its workforce.
“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 leased six floors, crowds packed the aisles, flanked by vendors who took up nearly every available floor space. Many in the crowd, mostly men in their teens to late 30s, were in a perpetual state of pitching their ideas for how to 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 the prices of some NFTs have fallen dramatically and the number of accounts trading NFTs has finally decreased this year.
Meanwhile, the broader crypto market has also fallen significantly. Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that serves as the backbone of the majority of 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 attendance at NFT.NYC is projected by the event’s organizer to triple from the last meeting in November. Undeterred by the “crypto winter,” attendees paid between $599 and $1,999 for tickets, then waited in lines that stretched around the block to enter the Marriott.
And many of the participants who spoke to NBC News offered a mix of optimism and inevitability about NFT technology. Many still see it as early days for NFTs, ripe for people to experiment with their own projects.
David Angelo, who 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 wore a giraffe costume to the conference. “Not everyone will be able to get to the promised land, which may be longer than we all hope and we all expect.”
Like many attendees, Angelo, an early crypto adopter, said he personally weathered the crypto winter just fine and saw it as an investment opportunity rather than a sign that the NFT market had peaked. But he acknowledged that people 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 funding, the company said on Wednesday. Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace launching in 2021, raised another $130 million. And Meta published an NFT-for-newbies guide on Wednesday, part of the company’s broader effort to convince users that it is the home of virtual worlds.
Some also see real-world applications. Jeanne Anderson, co-founder and CEO of Danvas, a company that plans to sell screens as canvases for digital art, said on NFT.NYC that art galleries that had invested heavily in NFTs are still embracing that market despite the downturn.
“Everybody knew winter was coming,” she said. “It came a little faster than some estimated, but nobody went into 2022 thinking there wouldn’t be a period of change.”
“There are very few institutional museums out there that immediately respond to trends. That’s just not what a museum is generally about, says Anderson.
Still, she said she was lucky to get $7 million in funding for her company in December, just before the crash.
“It would be tough to start your fundraising right now,” she said. “I think I feel lucky to have raised money when we did.”
NFT skeptics continue to express concerns about society’s tendency to overpromise 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 impersonator employee of an NFT company, and that his official conference brand read “Doop Snogg”.
