NFT NYC 2022: 3 Key Takeaways

This week wraps up 4 days of what can only be described as madness in Times Square in New York as tens of thousands of people from industry visionaries to rug-pull scam artists to a Snoop Dogg impersonator descended on the big apple.

So, how was it?

1) NFTs Are Terribly Misunderstood

By far, the most common commentary I heard riding up the elevator or walking around the conference area was "alpha" about some project or a group of people trying to get a "mint pass" to the next hot drop they could flip. While speculating on some asset you can try to flip on others is a use case of an NFT, it's not what an NFT actually is.

What is an NFT? An NFT isn't a jpg, it's not a speculative asset, it's not a security, it's not an in-game item...it's a technology that lets us represent a non-fungible asset that our world is full of onto a public, trustless ledger called a blockchain.

Why does this matter? This creates a decentralized way to represent things like ticketing, in-game items, music royalties, financial instruments, stocks & bonds, supply chain tracking, authenticity of physical goods, digital art, collectibles, real estate deeds, healthcare records, etc, etc, etc where other platforms can access the assets and build ecosystems around us.

Understanding NFTs shouldn't be relevant to end consumers...just like people don't need to understand TCP/IP in order to open Zoom and have a meeting. I put together a quick thread on this on Twitter around our Solana announcement:

2) We Need Higher Standards for Speakers

As a nascent and emerging industry, we need to be conscious that the vast majority of the population is new to our space and coming to industry events to learn. These conferences will be the first impression that many will use to decide how to categorize "web3" whether as a technology, as an asset, as a scam, or as something else.

At over 1,200 or 1,500 speakers (including yours truly), we're putting horribly misinformed individuals on stage (hopefully not including yours truly) to educate those curious about our space and making a terrible first impression. Despite the vast breadth of industries that web3 will revolutionize, I can't think of 100 let alone 1,000 people that I would put on a stage and trust to introduce the world to our industry. The vast majority of speakers shilling their pump and dump schemes disguised as PFP projects, metaverses, or web3 games perpetuates the negative stereotypes in the first point. We need to do a better job as an industry of putting the right foot forward.

3) Communities Are Thriving

Despite the current market conditions in crypto and some challenging NYC weather, a mind boggling amount of people descended on NYC to an even more mind boggling amount of satellite events.

From educational panels (shoutout to Google Cloud, Aptos, Justin Blau (Royal), Dillon Rosenblatt (Autograph), Spencer Dinwiddie (Calaxy), Mo Shaikh (Aptos), and Vivian Lewitt (YouTube) for a great conversation) :

Corporate events (shoutout OpenSea):

and NFT project communities (shoutout to BAYC):

The clear takeaway was that web3 is bringing people together. Interest is what I would consider at an all time high and I think we're still staggeringly early. Just like the .com crash in 2001 didn't mean the internet "wouldn't happen" or "was dead", the current market conditions don't mean that web3 is going away. Quite the contrary, it's here to stay and only going to continue to grow.

Even the Smol Brains community surprised me after my talk with a nice photoshop and some community love.

Closing Thoughts:

Overall, we're extremely early in web3 which is still a horribly misunderstood technology. To be fair, smartphones, Amazon, Netflix, and others weren't obvious in the 90s either. We need to be way more aware of how we represent ourselves as an industry if we want to accelerate crossing the chasm from rug-pulls to a world changing technology.

We're heads down at Fortress building the technology that's going to empower the next wave of entrepreneurs and innovators to build web3 platforms - go build!