“NFTs cannot scale” in their current form, say the Superduper co-founders

“NFTs can’t scale!” according to the founders of Web3 entertainment company Superduper during a talk at this year’s NFC summit in Lisbon.

The company’s co-founders Joe Carnell and Dom Smith later sat down with Decrypt and clarified that they undoubtedly believe NFTs can scale “to hundreds of millions of people, we just think in its current format, it won’t.”

When the pair say “scaling,” they don’t mean the technical side of it—such as increasing the transaction throughput of a given blockchain—rather, they mean the process of onboarding NFT users in the millions.

Their ambitions are hardly modest either. On startup LinkedIn, Superduper describes its “mission to onboard the first billion users.”

However, they say there are three main considerations for getting there. First, they consider how NFTs could disrupt the entertainment industry. Second, there is user experience (UX), and third, public perception.

“I think quite a few builders are now waking up to the fact that we need to build something that sustains, it’s here during the bear market that thrives during the bull,” Carnell said. “And it’s not just looking at the input—what’s new—it’s looking at the output, what’s the real value? What do people really care about?”

Superduper’s brand connection

The Superduper founders have also worked with streaming titan Spotify through another of their Web3 entertainment franchises: Overlord, a “story-driven gaming ecosystem” related to the firm’s Creepz NFT project.

In February this year, Overlord joined Spotify’s token-gated playlist pilot, which allows holders of the NFTs to try a unique crypto integration on the streaming platform.

“The first thing we recognize is that no one knows what they are doing. But that’s a good thing,” Smith said Decrypt. “Because everyone is exploring the technology and trying to figure out how to create the most value for audiences and brands in the long term.”

He adds that ultimately it comes back to “the dirty word ‘revenue’, how can you drive more productization to the companies, which in turn benefits the users because you’re reinvesting in product and experience?”

As for next steps, the pair say their team is at full capacity “at 45 to 50 people” and is going “very deep” on short-form social media content for Twitter, Tik Tok and Instagram, and building long-form content “for platforms like Netflix.”