I met a spy dressed as the mystery man

Times Square has been worse than usual this week. Since Tuesday, the usual hordes of theatergoers and people in Tin Man costumes have been joined by thousands of NFT lovers on strings, heading down to New York’s most enlightened neighborhood for three days of NFT panels for the “leading annual NFT” the event. ” NFT.NYC.

Now you’ve probably heard the tip about what NFTs are (“It’s a digital ownership receipt for a jpeg that looks like shit,” someone may have told you in a bar). But the broader project of NFT culture is, reductively, to make all aspects of human interaction a commodity. There are NFTs to drink coffee, play football, go ice skating and buy streetwear, engage in feminism, join private clubs, attend conferences and, I assure you, much more. Fortunately, this is not going well. NFTs, as you may know, are bad. Per den Wall Street Journal, they are “flatlining”; In May, daily sales had fallen 92 percent from their peak in September last year. This makes it a very fun time to host what the Insider called the “Coachella of NFTs” (as perhaps a neat illustration of his poor marketing instincts, the conference’s founder prefers the clunkier epithet, “the South by Southwest of NYC”).

Maybe because the money-making side of NFTs does not make that much money, the word on everyone’s lips on NFT.NYC was “community”. The conference’s Twitter biography reads: “NFT.NYC brings the NFT community together in NYC.” There were countless lectures on topics such as «The power of NFT investments through community», «NFT brand building and community building», «How to build an NFT market and community», «Security measures for community building», «7 ways to optimize NFTs on for community ”and the ominous“ NFT Community Service Hour ”. As one Miami real estate developer told me, “I do not view NFTs as an investment. I believe in technology and society. ” Straight on.

Wednesday night I tried to get a sense of what that community is like. In particular, my boss wanted me to make an “NFT party report”, so I took a look at the conference’s list of “satellite and community events” (which, for a trade show with over 1000 speakers, was relatively short), and found that Eventbrite of something called the “Flyfish Club Cocktail Party.” Flyfish Club, which I learned from a quick Google, is “the world’s first NFT restaurant.” Technically, it is not a restaurant yet. They do not have a store front. But early next year, they plan to open an international “seafood-focused” eatery somewhere in New York, where only the owners of their proprietary NFT, or others who rent these NFTs for one night, can eat. For now, the party will be at Scampi, an Italian place in Flatiron.

Like the hypothetical blockchain-enabled restaurant, the party was invited only. But thanks to a very kind doorman, a possibly related high relationship between men and women who were present, and the only name that came to mind when I was asked if I knew anyone inside (“Andrew Sullivan”), the community released an NFT -loose loafer in. their temporary home. I have to say that I thought the community was nice, mostly the part that involves an open bar, a spread of high-end crudité, and servers that mill around and offer a kind of tartar on a razor blade. The conversations were also better than I expected. I had exactly three of them, except for the sweet doorman who checked in periodically to see if “Andrew Sullivan” had made it.

The first guy I met while trying to eat giant slices of hard salami in a minimally nasty way had also come alone. He was also not a member of the club, but a nice restaurateur who stopped by to look at the business model. He works for a restaurant company that owns a sushi place in New York and San Francisco, where the latter has still not reopened after the pandemic. They thought about the key to NFTs. I asked him how much money he had lost in crypto, and he said “It’s not good right now.” We exchanged LinkedIns.

Back at the salami station, I met a real estate developer from Miami who goes by “Chichi”, even though that’s not his real name. He came wearing a Moonbirds hat, so this was not his first blockchain-based private club rodeo. He had joined the Flyfish Club by order of Resy co-founder Gary Vaynerchuk, or Gary Vee. “I follow everything Gary Vee says,” Chichi said. He had also lost a lot on crypto and NFT. But as mentioned earlier, he does not think of them as an investment, as much as a community. He did not plan to participate much in this special community, based in Miami. Instead, he largely planned to generate passive income by renting out the Flyfish Club membership to interested but less committed community members. We also exchanged LinkedIns.

The grand finale was a 20-minute chat with a man wearing a Riddler jacket, a Hawaiian shirt and a necklace of large titanium rings. He also had a bright, neon green LED backpack, but he was not wearing it. The Riddler had come to market its “bio-authentication hospitality technology business.” The point, if I remember correctly, is that this technology would simplify the dining experience by scanning your face at check-in to automatically find your reservation. The ordering and dining experience would continue as normal, but instead of paying at the end, you can just go. The face scan will charge your card. He said they had applied for a patent and that Oracle was involved in some way.

Crucially, Riddler was not always concerned with face scanning. He claimed to be a spy in Hawaii. I have no idea if this is true, but for about 10 minutes he described how, after joining the Army, he had worked as a satellite image analyst for US intelligence. More specifically, he claimed to have worked with PRISM, the NSA’s data collection program from which Edward Snowden leaked classified documents from 2013. The Riddler had mixed feelings about his high-profile, alleged former colleague. “I am concerned about the intelligence services in Bulgaria, which had families,” he said, “but I think the American public had a right to know what was going on.”

Spy life sounded good – he worked only six months a year in Hawaii – but in the end he had to go his own way. After working for a new political party, which I do not want to identify to protect his identity, he started an acne prevention pillow company. He claims that they were pioneers in pillowcase technology, but that the business collapsed when his partner embezzled all their money. I did not find more information about this online. But these days he is in face scanning services. “I think it’s going to change the world,” he said. In the end, we exchanged LinkedIns.

All in all, I found a pretty nice community, if one that primarily took place on LinkedIn. Around 9:30 a.m., I slipped out the door without Andrew Sullivan, and headed downtown. Unfortunately, some of my real life friends had their own NFT party. I guess the community came from the house.