The NFT.NYC conference that took place this week was spread across six venues, in three days, with more than 600 speakers, and 5,500 tickets sold with over 3,000 remaining on waiting lists due to space limitations. Just a couple of years ago, in February 2019, the event was just a small curiosity that draw only a few hundreds of people interested in NFTs.
Times Square now hosted 15 different NFT-themed billboards. The city was full of dinners, raves, parties, and digital art galleries which promoted NFT films and musicians. This proves how fast the industry has moved, going from barely existing to creating new business models and inventions.
The head of CoinDesk Studios, Sam Ewen, uses the term “the power of evangelism” to describe how NFT enthusiasts share concepts and ideas among themselves, making the industry grow even more.
The Increasing Popularity of NFTs
Ethereum continues to be the ruler of NFTs, as most of them are minted there, which means that ETH reaching a new ATH the week of NFT.NYC is no coincidence. Of course, due to the problems the network is facing, people were taken aback to discover that, in some cases, the fees for a transaction had a higher cost than the NFT they wanted to trade. This gives Solana, Avalanche, and Flow an edge over it and, indeed, the first two tokens mentioned went up by quite a lot this week.
Of course, people worry that if we just move from one network to another, we will simply create isolated islands that won’t let people move their assets around. This technology was meant to launch us to the future of Web 3, but, so far, it is simply creating a new version of Web 2.
Of course, the talking point of the moment is the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg wants to create. Then again, it is rather antithetical to the whole concept in itself that the metaverse would be controlled by someone with such high interests. Maybe it would be safer to say that Facebook isn’t building THE metaverse, but simply a version of it as what we actually need is an open metaverse.
But no matter what is going on with these platforms, we simply can’t forget the power that celebrities have and the audience that they bring. The NFT.NYC event saw Quentin Tarantino release a “Pulp Fiction” NFT, Kaskade had a sold-out concert, and Questlove, Chris Rock, Lil Baby, Beck, Aziz Ansari, and The Strokes, all took part in an event sponsored by Bored Ape Yacht Club.