A bit more literate article here<p><a href="https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/04/20/nft-marketplaces-sales-users-drop-to-lows-not-seen-since-2021-dune-data-shows/" rel="nofollow">https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2023/04/20/nft-marketplaces-sa...</a><p>Those of us who aren’t blockheads are happy with the situation because we are hearing very little about NFTs except from the occasional slow moving corporation that decided to get into NFTs a year ago and is now heading into the dead mall.
Good. Wash trading and ponzi schemes [1][2] just found new tech new tricks and thusly new victims.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_o3nZHzCwA</a> [video][4 mins][bill maher, ben mckenzie]<p>[2] - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpqreZlmHGU</a> [video][8 mins][ben mckenzie, cnn]
Peak 2021 was itself a "stimulus-led fad", as Bloomberg put it: <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-03/nft-price-crash-stirs-debate-on-whether-stimulus-led-fad-is-over" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-03/nft-price...</a><p>The whole thing was always fake. To the extent NFTs were a thing, they were another speculative asset for crypto degens. That's all they ever were.
><i>"The og ape clubhouse noises, The og lazy lion twitter raids, The og @ohhshiny twitter spaces, the og NFT culture that built the 2021 peak market. All gone forever. The current NFT culture is this: Greed, shadiness and scams"</i><p>It's remarkable how much of this sounds like the lamentations we have for Web 1.0, back when the Internet was fun and creative and there were no corporate sites to speak of.<p>We now come full circle, with Web3 speedrunning the history of the WWW.
The JPEG-flipping profile picture culture may be dead, but the technology works.<p>NFTs are great if you need cryptographic proof of ownership. I believe this actually has a ton of unexplored utility, even though people now associate "NFT" with pictures of monkeys.<p>The only NFTs I currently use are from Uniswap, but I think it's likely I'll use them for all sorts of ownership in the future.<p>NFTs can also make things like subscription services and club memberships transferable by allowing secondary marketplaces where they otherwise would not exist, which should be good for both businesses and customers. POAPs are pretty interesting too.
I mention this every time NFTs come up here but those stupid monkey jpegs are dumb.<p>ENS is, to me, a perfect usecase for NFTs. What you "own" is a hash that represents a human readable name. That ownership is stored in a global database that isn't owned by anyone and can't be tampered with.<p>Now you have a cryptographically secure human readable "address" you can use just like a domain to point to anything you want.<p>And just by being deployed on Ethereum your domain or subdomains can receive money and tokens directly. It can be used to receive encrypted communications. So much other stuff.
The next scam will necessarily not look anything like the last con. If it looks like the last one, the marks will avoid it, thinking that they have learned to avoid being conned entirely.<p>Think about this the next time that you hear something like "but $newHype is nothing like NFTS!" No, of course not, that's not guarantee of authenticity.
I mean, NFTs are about as primitive as Bitcoin and Ethereum... I don't think NFTs will be relevant in the way people think or want during the next crypto rush.