NFT NYC once again demonstrated the resilience of Web3 culture
On Tuesday, a financial reporter friend messaged me to ask if I would attend NFT NYC events the next day. “How is that happening this year when the volume is so low,” she asked. I sent her a spreadsheet that listed 180 different events happening over the next three days around the city – there was a lot to do.
On Wednesday afternoon, I was standing outside Samsung’s Future+ launch event doing an interview with a radio reporter who asked me if this year’s event felt like a shell of what it once was, since NFTs are bad after all.
Hi, I get it. After the 2021 speculative JPEG flipping bubble popped and overall NFT sales volume fell, the mocking stories are writing themselves. It’s easy to see today’s NFT space as a punchline, especially if you focus on a single brutal data point that compares volume at its peak to volume now. (NFT sales increased to $2 billion in February, by the way, and fell just short of $2 billion in March.)
But if you ask me if the scene is dead, the answer is a clear no. NFT NYC events I attended this year had the energy, positivity, and idea sharing I’ve come to expect from cryptocultural gatherings over the past few years. Six weeks after an NFT Paris that blew me away, NFT NYC reinforced that Web3 and NFT culture is alive and well, bear market or not. Here are just a few moments I saw that should excite Web3 builders, and may even pique the curiosity of skeptics.
1. 9dcc Treasure Hunt: NFT collector and influencer Gmoney and his Web3 luxury brand 9dcc staged an NFT treasure hunt with stops across the city. Contestants had to hit at least seven different locations from a larger list over the course of three days, checking in at each one by scanning their phones to earn a POAP (proof-of-attendance protocol) NFT showing they were there; prizes included a rare Chromie Squiggle NFT. At every party I attended, I saw people wearing the 9dcc ballcap they received at the hunt’s first stop, and raved about the creativity of the experience. This is one of many use cases we see for NFTs that are unique, social, marketable and actually use the technology.
2. Jeremy Booth’s NFC-Chipped Wrangler Jacket: Commercial artist Jeremy Booth, a former illustrator at Coinbase, has been making a splash in the NFT art space thanks to his sharp Western-themed artwork featured in collections like “Boots” and “Dirt.” I time for NFT NYC, he partnered with Wrangler on a custom “Western Art Dept” black denim jacket, emblazoned with his own cowboy art and embedded with an NFC (near-field communication) chip that allowed anyone Jeremy encountered during the week to scan the sleeve and earn a Concrete Cowboys “proof of friendship” POAP with his art on it. Again: the kind of thing that NFT skeptics could dismiss as a gimmick, but to me it combines original art, fashion, and an IRL experience, all in a way that brought more attention and fans to a deserving digital artist.
3. Bitcoin NFTs are toasted at a Bitcoin-themed bar: It wasn’t that long ago that NFTs were strictly “an Ethereum thing,” and so-called Bitcoin maximalists wanted nothing to do with NFTs. That has changed with the soaring popularity of Ordinal Inscriptions, digital artifacts built on the Bitcoin blockchain, made possible by Bitcoin’s Taproot upgrade last fall. At this happy hour hosted by Trust Machines at PubKey, a Bitcoin-themed bar in Manhattan that opened last year (Bloomberg set it on fire for not accepting Bitcoin as payment; it does now), let’s just say that I met a lot of familiar faces who are very influential on Crypto Twitter and who a year ago were absolutely not talking publicly about NFTs. Now Bitcoiners are buzzing about Taproot Wizards, Bitcoin Apes and Ordinals at Magic Eden.
4. Web3 sci-fi TV series gets big names: Veteran TV actor David Bianchi was in town to promote his upcoming dystopian sci-fi series “RZR,” which announced this week that it has added Mena Suvari and Danny Trejo to the cast in special guest. star roles. I met David outside SoHo House and he showed me a clip from the show, which is in post-production; it looked very smooth. The eight-episode series is truly a Web3-native effort: a live-action series produced by a Web3 company for Web3 release. It will premiere in July on the new streaming platform from Gala Film, a division of Web3 games company Gala Games; show creator Bianchi’s production company sold NFTs to incentivize engagement (holders will gain access to bonus content); and the plot involves crypto. Bianchi is already in talks with several major streaming platforms about a possible wider release after the series launches at Gala.
These are just a few memorable moments, but they reflect what excites me about Web3 right now: unique use cases of the technology in art, fashion and entertainment, and in ways that reward artists and creators.
Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, which is betting billions of dollars on the metaverse, said it well when we chatted at NFT Paris in February. “We think the future of crypto, and Web3 in general, is culture,” he said. “We think of culture maybe an artist or musician, but actually, if it wasn’t for that artist or musician, you wouldn’t have Netflix, you wouldn’t have HBO, you wouldn’t have Sony PlayStation, you wouldn’t if you didn’t have a TV, you wouldn’t have radio, you wouldn’t have everything you like right now. Culture is the biggest soft power and maybe the biggest driver of economic growth.”
Even Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX founder who spends his day trading crypto and tweeting about price action, is impressed by the culture. His Twitter PFP is currently a Taproot Wizard NFT. “In my view, NFTs are a data construct, and it’s a data construct that allows us to trade human culture,” he told us in an interview for the gm podcast that comes out this week. “Everything we do other than eating and sleeping is culture, right? It’s sports. It’s going to a nice restaurant. It’s looking at art. It’s listening to music. The NFTs are: How do I make this rare? How do I this tradable? How do I give money back to the creators? And this is probably, I think, one of the biggest applications of this cryptographic money technology that we’re building, it unlocks the potential of the long tail of human culture and allows everyone to participate. . “
It’s hard not to feel energized by that take.
