Community Isn’t the ONLY Thing (NFTs Need To Offer More)

TL;DR

• There’re only so many Discord community chats that folks in the NFT space will be able to bare, before they become fatigued.

• Which means, at a certain point ‘community access’ is bound to become an over saturated selling point, and turn into a burden.

• Plus, if NFTs are eventually going to be used by everyone – art and community access can’t be the only applications (it won’t scale).

• So we figured we’d spit ball a potential timeline between now and the point at which NFTs are everywhere. Here’s the rough timeline of applications we’re imagining:

• Art & Collectibles → Community Access → Gaming (👈 we are currently here) → Online Social Identities/Accounts → Everywhere-ness.

Full Story

So the Azuki team just announced they’d be releasing 20,000 new NFTs!

Each NFT in the ‘Elementals’ series will grant holders access to…something – no one knows just yet, it was only recently announced.

But given the size of the Azuki project, it’s probably going to be greater than just new art and access to a gated online community.

In fact, it kind of needs to be at this point…

Not just for Azuki, but for all projects. Here’s our thinking:

There’re only so many Discord community chats that folks in the NFT space will be able to bare, before they become fatigued.

(At a certain point ‘community access’ is bound to become an over saturated selling point, and turn into a burden).

Which got us wondering…

If NFTs first functioned as ‘digital art,’ then evolved to grant access to gated online communities – where does it all go from here?

Because if NFTs are eventually going to be used by everyone – art and community access can’t be the only applications (it won’t scale).

So we figured we’d spit ball a potential timeline between now and the point at which NFTs are everywhere.

Here’s the rough timeline of applications we’re imagining:

Art & Collectibles → Community Access → Gaming (👈 we are currently here) → Online Social Identities/Accounts → Everywhere-ness.

If we had to boil it down, we’d summarize each milestone like this:

1. Art & Collectibles: digital art and collectibles, made sellable.

2. Community Access: NFT gated online communities.

3. Gaming: collect NFTs as in-game items.

4. Online Social Identities/Accounts: think ‘Sign in with Google,’ but it’s ‘Sign in with a crypto wallet holding a certain NFT.’ The difference being: you own your digital identity/data, instead of Google.

5. Everywhere-ness: all of the above… Plus: anything that requires proof of ownership, ticketing, or rewards (flights, concerts, movies, conferences, real estate, loyalty programs, etc.)

The sticking point:

Blockchain systems need to become way cheaper, faster, and easier to use for any of the above to happen.

(They need to feel largely indistinguishable from our current Web2 experiences).

Will we get there? No idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But it’d be a lot cooler if we did.