Meet the new cool kids on the block

2021 was a huge year for NFTs, with a staggering $17 billion of NFTs changing hands – but the NFT highs of last year are no more, and after the peaks seen last fall, the next few months took individual sales from a daily average of 225 000 sales to just 19,000, (a drastic 92% drop from September 2021 to May 2022).

As the Wall Street Journal gloomily reported in June 2022, NFT sales are “flattening”. Yet, despite these pessimistic headlines and doomsday for mainstream media pundits, and yes, despite some legitimate concerns, there is indeed room for optimism.

First, the mainstream media expert class is often flawed, and NFTs are a very broad asset class. Some NFTs are like traditional works of art, with unique pieces that sell well (the value here is usually derived from the artist’s fame), some of them come in groupings or collections, with the famous Bored Ape Yacht Club being the prime example (these are ” social NFTs”, with value lying in the identity they offer their holders).

Despite the headlines, the mainstream media forgot to present the data sets that showed the shift in the NFT market itself – the most important shift being an increase in the ratio of buying wallets to selling wallets, and secondly, social NFTs now command 83% of NFTs -market (according to data from Nansen), which means that the market has matured, and moved away from cheap and risky collections, and consolidated around established “blue chip” projects.

Furthermore, NFTs remain a key component in the transition from web 2.0 to web3. We are currently seeing this transition happen in real time, and we can see the digital landscape shift from the current, centralized web2, which is dominated by the huge conglomerates who jealously guard control over all avenues of revenue generation, to web3 where we return to the the very early days of the internet and its deeply decentralized structure, with content ownership back in the hands of those who created it, rather than those who provided the platform to host it.

And so, filled with optimism that the NFT market is not yet dead, this brings us to explore some of the more exciting projects out there today – as it happens, one area that is particularly exciting is Central and Eastern Europe .

Estonia, a small country with only 1.3 million people, is also a technological powerhouse, which gave the world technology giants such as Skype, TransferWise or PlayTech. The country boasts digital services that are far ahead of some of the largest economies in the world, and the capital Tallinn, despite being a beautiful medieval city, is also one of the most modern cities in the world. It is no surprise that it is often referred to as the “Silicon Valley by the Baltic”.

Unsurprisingly for a tech powerhouse, Estonia has some amazing NFT projects, including Artano, a community-curated NFT marketplace on Cardano. Built on Cardano to avoid high gas fees and transaction fees, Artano focuses on being as accessible as possible as an ecosystem, and open to people all over the world. Marija Skijevic, the Serbian co-founder and COO of the Estonian project recently told Unchained that she sees a bright future for Europe, at the heart of the creative side of decentralization.

Artano is thriving, with several important European values ​​at the core of the project, such as a focus on democracy via community curation and sustainability guiding the founders in their choice of blockchain.

Poland, like Estonia, has also emerged as a major tech hub, but given its significantly larger population, the country has the benefit of a deeper talent pool. Polish developers are highly respected and sought after, with HackerRank ranking Polish developers third in the world. The excitement around Polish technology is also confirmed by the large investments the country has attracted – Google invested almost $2.0 billion in the country in a bid to make it the cloud capital of Europe, while Microsoft announced it would invest $1 billion in expanding its operations in the country. country.

No surprise then that Poland has some great projects of its own, including Fancy Bear’s Metaverse, which operates as a DAO. FBM is a collection of 8,888 programmatically randomly generated bear animations with unique accessories in the form of NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain, and it is now one of Europe’s largest NFT projects.

Bartek Sibiga, one of the founders and CEO of FBM says “I would say that there was too much hype when many projects were launched – and I think 95% of them will be gone in one or two years.”, while he claims that only those that provide real utility and value will survive. FBM are very active in the metaverse and the founders have a 3D scanner that will allow holders of FBM NFTs to scan themselves at upcoming parties, to create digital avatars of themselves that can be uploaded into the metaverse.

Another exciting project from Poland is Kleks Academy, which is the universe built around the Kleks Academy film, produced by the team behind the smash hits “365 Days 1 and 2” and “How I Fell In Love With a Gangster”, which received well over 500 million viewers Worldwide. The film is a revival of an old Polish story, and of a cult film from the 1980s, reinvented for the modern viewer and adapted for a global audience.

The project, with its limited collection of multi-D NFTs, wants to give moviegoers a whole new experience, bringing people to the cinema like never before. The project is mainly built on the unique real-life benefits of multi-D NFTs, which act as an entry ticket to the Kleks universe. These will bring holders in contact with the film at all.

Access starts before the film is even made, with the opportunity to visit the set, be an extra or even get a speaking role in the film. When the film is released, holders will have access to special screenings and access to augmented reality elements in the film as well as the opportunity to be featured in the credits and have parts of the set or costumes used in the production. After the movie, NFT holders will be able to continue their Kleks adventure with the Kleks Academy metaverse.

Finally, adversity and tragedy have brought forth yet another kind of innovation in the NFT world. Just east of Poland, in Ukraine, amid the chaos and horror of the Russian invasion, Alexey Kondakov, a multimedia artist working in Kyiv, launched Reverberate Ukraine, an art collection of 5 NFTs of artwork he created to “show the world what is like living in a war”. Teaming up with legendary auction house Bonhams and crypto-donation solution The Giving Block, his project will feature the sale of 1,000 physical prints of one of his artworks, with proceeds going directly to World Central Kitchen’s Chefs for Ukraine.

These are just some of the exciting and innovative projects coming from Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has long been undiscovered, undervalued and forgotten, but which is now finally emerging as a challenger and a powerhouse in the technology industry.