How NFT Misinformation Hurts the Environment

In 2019, nature photographer Frank Liu took a photo of a spotted zebra. The picture was covered up National Geographic, Forbes, Smithsonian Magazine, and featured on the cover of several South African publications. Today, Liu is trying to move beyond his Web2 heritage and traditional media. He travels the world building a community of artists interested in facilitating wildlife conservation using Web3 technologies.

But there is a problem.

A combination of blockchain fears and misunderstandings about NFTs and the environment have stymied his conservation efforts — and what could be one of the biggest funding opportunities many small NGOs have ever seen.

The journey into Web3

“I started taking pictures at university,” Liu tells nft now. “In 2016, after my first trip to the Maasai Mara reserve in Kenya, my photos were published in The sun, Guardianand Daily Mail.”

Three years later, Liu took the now famous photos of a spotted baby Zebra. If you Google “spotted Zebra”, the first five articles are about Liu’s photo. Even ChatGPT knows the answer to the question “Who took the picture of the spotted zebra in 2019?” Liu was in the running for the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year award once or twice. But he just peaked at 300 — the contest attracts nearly 50,000 entries.

And then the pandemic happened.

Liu says it ended his livelihood. Two years of preparatory work with agencies, tour operators, guides and safari lodges went up in smoke.

Then one of Liu’s former colleagues explained Web3 to him. The colleague had worked with a blockchain company called Empowa that used DeFi to help remote communities get housing in Africa. At the time, Liu was not a complete stranger to blockchain. He had bought his first bit of crypto in 2017, but he hadn’t cared much since then. The pandemic changed things.

Liu and his colleagues decided to put together a wildlife NFT project on the Cardano blockchain, both to support themselves and to raise funds for NGOs focused on wildlife conservation.

Liu says the team chose Cardano because it was more sustainable than some other chains. It also had its own fund, and users would vote on projects they wanted to see developed. Liu’s analysis indicated that the Cardano community tended to vote for projects with a real mission and impact, so it seemed like a natural fit.

But misinformation made the implementation of the project an uphill battle.

Troubled waters

Due to the royalty features built into smart contracts, NFTs can provide creators and the organizations they support with a recurring, reliable source of income. In this regard, Liu notes that NFTs “represent a more sustainable source of income for these [smaller] NGOs than other sources.”

Liu’s idea was to create an NFT project similar to trading cards. Personally controlled artists would submit their images and these would be turned into collectibles with icons on them. These icons will display the artist’s name, the animal’s scientific name, information about the animal’s habitat, whether the population is increasing or decreasing, and other important details that help raise awareness of that species.

The first challenge Liu experienced came from artists. Many of the creators he contacted said they were concerned about sustainability issues stemming from blockchain technologies. Despite his attempts to allay their fears and explain how blockchains actually work, not everyone Liu approached helped him. Several photographers remained unconvinced, positive that NFTs were harming the environment, and condemned the entire practice as unsustainable.

Likewise, the NGOs Liu addressed cited concerns over sustainability. After speaking with them at length, Liu says it became clear that they did not understand the difference between chains or consensus models.

This poses a real problem.

Liu usually approached niche NGOs focusing on a particular species or geographic zone. Because they are so niche, their work is important. No one is there to take over if they don’t survive. According to Liu, these niche NGOs are also constantly in survival mode – spread far too thin and desperate for funding. This is precisely why NFTs can work so well for them.

An NFT project can provide them with urgently needed funds over and above social media campaigns and other slow-burn methods. In exchange, these NGOs can offer unique content for NFT holders due to their niche position. Liu explains that this value can be original footage, walkalongs around habitats and other content that would otherwise cost tourists far more than the price of a single NFT. It’s a win-win.

But according to Liu, things are getting increasingly difficult and looking more and more bleak. People see sensational articles that are missing some context and take them as truth.

And unfortunately, Liu is not the only one with problems. Many who have attempted to initiate conservation efforts via NFTs have been met with disdain and watched as their projects faltered and failed due to poor information.

A tale of two wildlife foundations

Nowhere is the mass misunderstanding of Web3 more evident than in the NFT projects launched by the World Wildlife Foundations (WWF) in Germany and the UK. The first – non-mushroom animals – was a resounding success, raising nearly $300,000 for critically endangered species. The latter – Tokens for Nature – which ran on the same chain, was a bloodbath.

Non-Fungible Animals – named to represent how one animal and species can never be replaced by another – is still going strong almost a year and a half after its launch. Each animal represented in the project – the Amur tiger, Baltic porpoise, Persian leopard and others – had exactly the same number of NFTs made for it as there are members of the population. For example, the Giant Panda collection contained 1,864 NFTs because there are only 1,864 Giant Pandas in the world. Giant Ibis had 290 NFTs. The rarer animals were more expensive.

The project was eventually widely supported by advertising agencies and publicists.

Anna Graf, the Web3 innovation manager at Arvato systems, was an independent NFT consultant in 2021 when she was asked to advise on the German WWF NFT project. “I found [the project] very interesting,” she tells nft now, “because it was the first NGO project in the chain that I had ever heard of.” Graf connected the project with well-known NFT Artist BossLogicwho had previously worked with the likes of Disney and Marvel Studios.

On the sustainability side, the German WWF project chose Polygon. They also created their own marketplace so that it was possible to seamlessly pay by credit card through MoonPay, which was “quite a barrier” at the time, says Graf. Today, MoonPay is integrated with OpenSea and other marketplaces. A year and a half ago, that was not the case.

Another element that made the German project successful was a powerful storytelling technique, says Graf. The group used advertising agencies to weave the narrative of the number of these animals into the story. The project promoted the concept of art on chain as opposed to just buying NFTs for investment purposes. In this sense, the project became a visionary project and distanced itself from the cash and “too good to be true” 10x and 20x ROI promises that plagued early and mid-2021.

“For us it was never about the funds,” said a spokesperson for WWF Germany The Verge after the WWF UK debacle. “It was about raising awareness of the extinction of the species.”

In contrast to the success of Non-Fungible Animals, two days after the launch of the NFT project, WWF UK backtracked and offered almost $50,000 worth of refunds to NFT buyers. So why did it fail where its counterpart flourished? Misinformation.

“[WWF UK] totally failed,” says Graf, “because instead of focusing on the art, they told people that Polygon is a chain that is totally carbon neutral or needs less carbon than drinking a glass of water.” It is impossible to accurately determine the cost of a single NFT transaction because they are processed in blocks. WWF’s statement was therefore not entirely truthful. “So they kind of lied, and this led to a big discussion,” says Graf.

WWF UK’s soapboxing about carbon emissions from NFTs takes on a bitter taste when you consider that WWF received a $400,000 grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in 2019 – a family that grew fat on a century of oil production.

Graf believes it is possible that the WWF UK department was not so accurately informed about the technical elements of the project, which led to them giving incorrect information about it. But she says she was not involved in that project and cannot claim this with complete certainty.

The drumbeat helps no one

Small voluntary organizations are dying. They are overwhelmed. They need funding now. Their loss would be a disaster for the environmental zone they cover. NFTs open a realistic door to that funding. Although greenwashing the blockchain is not the solution, it is important to promote correct information and context about energy use compared to other environmental culprits.

For starters, Netflix uses up to 36,000 times more energy than PoS Ethereum. PayPal uses 100 times more energy. Why the clamor for NGOs accepting donations via PayPal? Global data centers are right up there with energy production – a whopping 78,000 times more than PoS Ethereum.

You’d think gold mining would be the worst culprit. But no. And neither is Bitcoin. The biggest planet killer on the scale of energy consumption, with 94,000 times more consumption than PoS Ethereum, is YouTube. But where are the crowds demanding the removal of the latest WWF YouTube video to raise money?

And don’t forget to close every bank on earth. JPMorgan emitted 766 tons of CO2e in 2022, and Bank of America didn’t fare much better. According to anti-NFTs’ logic, NGOs should not accept funds through banks either.

The list goes on. At some point the arguments become meaningless and baseless without context. And they actually cause more damage because NFTs can represent the first breath of hope for small NGOs to get their heads above water for years.

Getting an NFT project off the ground is hard enough without all the anti-blockchain rhetoric. But such rhetoric – mainly the misinformation that accompanies it – cements any thoughtful hesitation into complete non-cooperation. “They just read the headlines,” Liu says of people who haven’t had much exposure to blockchain. “They say it has a lot of environmental impact, and so it goes against what they’re trying to do.”

Liu believes the technological barrier to entry for NGOs is much lower now than a year ago. But the latest wave of negative crypto news has worsened sentiment.

“It’s still too early to get them on board,” says Liu. So he’s now focusing on creating a worldwide collective of personally vetted artists called “Dreamxrs,” all with similar conservation goals, that he can bring together for an NFT project in the future “when the time is right.”

Hopefully, once his team is ready, the world will be more informed on the subject and allow NGOs to be helped by one of the best solutions to come their way in years.