Issuing coins is not the purpose: the final chapter and restart of NFT

Author: YBB Capital Researcher Zeke

1. The destruction of NFT

NFT's last tweet stopped at the issuance of Pudgy Penguins, and Doodles' recent token issuance has only splashed on Solana. Yuga Labs' subtraction continues, this time even the most soulful IP, Cryptopunks. The BitCoin NFTs in the last wave of revival of NFT have almost returned to zero. These once crazy narratives have indeed become lonely and no one cares about them anymore.

10k PFP's vision was once a beautiful one. A community of just the right size helped a bottom-up IP project to go to the world, which is completely different from the traditional IP project that spent money to support content in the past. For example, Disney's Marvel Universe, Star Wars, and various animation images often require years of precipitation and countless funds to make these IPs deeply rooted in the hearts of the people and eventually become a gold mine.

NFT is completely different. Its entry threshold is extremely low, and it is very fast to shape an IP and to asset IP. Creators only need to pay some Gas to hang their artwork on Opensea for sale. There are no galleries, no toy companies, film companies, and no professional team. An IP and a new artist were born.

We also witnessed three or four years ago that some bottom-up IPs are popular in the top entertainment circles in Europe, America, Japan and South Korea. A grassroots artist can also achieve amateur counterattack by relying on NFT. For me, as a generation Z who has grown up watching the world, it is extremely dreamy to be able to participate in IP investment and incubation that ordinary people once could not reach through Crypto.

But later, BAYC's "Crazy Doll" and Azuki's disaster-level sub-series Elemental were released after the sale. The vague status of NFT is gradually becoming clear. It is not like an equity or investment, but more like an expensive luxury with member benefits. The project party also hopes that we can continue to purchase sub-series to support them in the future to spend money on IP value kernel Roadmap. The seeds of contradictions are planted here. The project party knows that it is expensive to make content, but if you don’t make content IP, you will die. The sub-series that are posted every few months are constantly sucking blood and OG series holders, torture everyone in the community, and waiting for the feedback brought by the content may take many years, or perhaps this feedback will never be available. The cracks began to grow bigger, and those beautiful fantasies began to shatter with the decline in floor prices, and all the rest were all kinds of tear-ups.

2. The trump card of IP MCN-PoP MART

If NFT is regarded as a luxury trendy toy for Generation Z, its causes and failures will be clearer. In the fast food era, there is no content, it is not a bad thing. After all, it can quickly attract buyers based on its appearance alone. For example, Azuki's style is quite in line with the aesthetics of Asians. Under the consensus, this grassroots NFT series can also become the third largest blue chip after BAYC. In the real world, well-known trendy toys such as Bearbrick (Block Bear), B.Duck little yellow duck, and Molly have no content support, but they all rely on their unique appearance to be popular.

However, the trend is always a gust of wind, and without content as a value core, these IPs may be outdated at any time. Due to the culture of the currency circle and the ultra-low success rate of NFT, the project party often continues to refine its IP. But the reality is that the core has not yet made a prototype, and the gust of wind has passed.

Of course, there is also a type of PFP project with sufficient content support, Japanese NFT. In the past, I have seen at least four or five projects with well-known Japanese cartoon IPs hope to achieve great success in the NFT market. However, they have not seemed to think that the IP fan group is almost incompatible with this circle. The second point is that there are already so many Japanese anime that they can’t choose. Why do fans spend hundreds of times the price to buy a small picture? Of course, the most important thing is the third point. This small picture can only be a picture, and the imagination space for future empowerment is 0. Even if you purchase Gundam NFT, you can only get the entrance rights to Gundam Metaverse "SIDE-G". Wanda's profit from models, games, and animations naturally have nothing to do with you, and the community will not be a member of IP incubation, and it is even considered an alien in the entire Gundam fan group. At this point, GameFi's pain points are actually very similar.

At this point, the PFP project has become a false proposition, and only the pragmatic firewood of the Little Penguin is still working hard. So is there another way out for small pictures? I think PoP MART may give a different answer.

This small grid store, which originated from the Beijing Oumeihui Shopping Center, has achieved a turnaround with its agent Sonny Angel. This series alone contributed nearly 30% of PoP MART's sales at that time. The jealous copyright holder took back the exclusive agency rights a year later, but this move actually created the birth of an IP empire.

Wang Ning (founder of PoP MART) had a simple idea at this time, to make your own IP, and to be an IP that others cannot take away. In 2016, PoP MART cooperated with Hong Kong designer Wang Xinming to launch its first independent trendy toy series - Molly. This little girl with a pouting image instantly became popular all over the country, and was driven by the uncertainty of blind box gameplay and dopamine. PoP MART began its first rocket-like rise. By 2019, Molly's annual sales of a single IP had reached 456 million yuan, becoming PoP MART's core revenue source at this time.

This style of combining Japanese gamblers and high-end toys for joint branding was also very common in the NFT boom in the later years. The basic elements of the artist design are then handed over to the project party to combine them for series of pictures to sell and operate. NFTs are generally in the form of blind boxes during the initial stage, and the project side will release pictures of various rare combinations to enhance players' desire to buy.

The two are just different in the form of release, but tens of thousands of NFT projects and various blue chips have generally failed. And PoP MART is now ushering in a second spring, why?

I once attributed the reason to the difficulty of landing and the purchase threshold was too high. There is no problem with the former at present, while the latter is not the case. NFTs also had the local dog period of Free Mint. Goblintown and MIMIC SHHANS were both golden dogs of that period. Creators made a lot of money by just trading commissions. Many NFTs in the Inscription Age have a more thorough decentralization based on this, but this cannot stop NFTs from being desolate. It is very simple to form and join an IP community, but the difficulty is still to continue.

So, I think we might be pattern errors. After the first rocket-like rise, Molly did not make PoP MART a god. The entire company's stock price fell from 21 years to 24 years, just like NFT. But PoP MART has become popular. It relies on a whole IP wall. Now PoP MART has 12 own IPs including Molly, DIMOO, BOBO&COCO, YUKI, Hirono, 25 exclusive IPs including THE MONSTERS (including Labubu), PUCKY, SATYR RORY, and more than 50 non-exclusive co-branded IPs such as Harry Potter, Disney, and League of Legends.

People’s preferences are always erratic and IP’s life is limited, but what if I have hundreds of choices? Nowadays, Labubu is popular in Europe, America and Southeast Asia, and the value preservation of its surrounding dolls is as good as plastic Moutai. Yuga Labs' ideal was finally realized in Web2, but it was no surprise.

We should rethink what is IP business, what is NFT Roadmap, and why can PoP MART be so high without content support?

3. Pudgy Penguins

I also participated in the event in Little Penguin Hong Kong last year, and this NFT project is always so enthusiastic about the community.

Pudgy Penguins' success lies in being pragmatic, pragmatic or pragmatic. NFT itself cannot draw any technical differences. No matter how clever Mint's process design is, it is still a JPG in the end. What is difficult for NFT is the implementation of IP, which is hundreds of times the difficulty of making 10K PFP. Yuga Labs wants to do metaverse, and Azuki wants to do anime. OK, this is all cool, but these projects with hundreds of millions of dollars start, they will only pay for their families in the community.

This extremely compressed world is too impetuous and everyone wants to be eager to achieve success. The holder wants to make a lot of money, but the project party wants to reach the top in one step. Few blue chip projects are willing to bow their heads, and in the end they are more impatient and fall more miserably. Pudgy Penguins's original team was also such an impetuous grassroots team. After Fengping was killed, they took the little penguin at a low price.

It was only then that the little penguin met their real owner, Luca Netz, a worker with many years of experience in physical marketing, and brought the little penguin back to the height it should have. Luca Netz is really building a brand, he runs a company for NFT holders. From marketing to plush toys to future games, Little Penguin has a solid step, the company can make profits, and the holders can make profits. There is nothing special about it, it's just doing what it should do. Therefore, it turns out that bottom-up IP can exist in Web3, but there are too many projects that cannot put down their stature.

So, I hate the word "falsification", as if something should never exist. Electric cars used to be stupid, and the Siri on my phone was stupid. But it doesn’t prevent the entire city from being filled with green license plate cars nowadays, let alone AI.

Web3 will still try many so-called falsified tracks in the future, but it lacks a suitable project party.

4. Path

The path to success is simple, and the path to success is also difficult. The next stop of PFP will eventually have to break away from some of the inherent logical frameworks of Crypto. If you want to become the next Web3 Disney, you will need a lot of precipitation. Whether NFT scarcity has always played a counter-effect in the process of moving towards the masses has been discussed in my past articles. If it is defined as a trendy consumer product, then the limitation of 10K may be too great. If it is defined as an asset and fundraising method unique to Web3, then IP will eventually be converted into physical consumer products to fulfill its commitment to the community, rather than a bunch of weird sub-series.

Based on the unique culture of the currency circle and the NFT's own attributes, it is helpless to hold an IP until you get old. How can you make a fuss about these PFPs? How to expand a project into an IP factory? This may require us to accept some new concepts and introduce more technologies and gameplay.

5. Is the last stop to issue coins?

I still don’t understand what the meaning of issuing coins in NFT is. This situation is more like an exploitation of the superiors on the subordinates and a dilution of the value of OG NFTs. I can only understand it as this project is looking for a convenient way to exit liquidity.

From APE to DOOD, all of them are like variants of Air Coin without exception. Its empowerment is often that pledge can obtain some on-chain transaction dividends, prop purchases in the Metaverse, and governance rights. Ideally it is a perfect cycle for the three parties of holder → staker → developer. But from the reality, it is more like air, involved in the vicious cycle of NFT price drop, gold-based income drop, and token price drop.

For OG NFT holders, although Token has distributed some dividends and equity. But most of them also receive a large amount of airdrops during TGE, so no one complains. But in the long run, this is just as mentioned in the fourth paragraph, which is a kind of dilution, and distribution like Azuki's Anime is even more a kind of open grabbing.

Short-term popularity is very important, but the long-term survival of the project is more important. Don’t let issuing coins be the last stop.

Conclusion

In this fast-paced and dopamine era, we have witnessed the rise of many emerging Web2 IPs. NFT should grow well in this era and has many irreplaceable characteristics. I regarded it as Cyber ​​Moutai four years ago, but the reality is Cyber ​​Tulip. There are very few people willing to manage the ruins, but I believe that there must be the next Labubu hidden under the ruins.