Current Problems with the NEAR NFT Landscape

Background
NEAR NFTs were doing well at the start of 2022. The chain was garnering some interest, and naturally, liquidity was flowing into it. Project founders took notice of that, and we witnessed many new projects launch in January with (relatively) sizable mint raises. A lot of these projects have stuck around and built out essential NFT infrastructure with active communities backing them. This short-lived utopia stalled and eventually came to a stop. Less and less NFT projects were launching on NEAR. The ones that did launch were either not minting out or had to cut their NFT supply into ridiculously small numbers to ensure a “successful” mint. This effect was exacerbated by poor market conditions.

The Current Situation
In the present time, there is little to no liquidity when it comes to NEAR NFTs ($4k daily volume compared to $16m on Ethereum, $1.5m on Solana, and $440k on Cardano… as per https://cryptoslam.io/). This has prompted current project founders of some of the top projects on NEAR to seek cross-chain opportunities in order to keep their projects afloat. This constitutes a very severe issue that jeopardizes the health of the NEAR NFT ecosystem as a whole.
In essence, we are stuck in a vicious cycle: new projects are not launching on NEAR, so there is no liquidity on the chain… and there is no liquidity on the chain because new projects are not launching on NEAR.

How did we get here? And how do we get out of this?
The NEAR Foundation’s role in supporting new projects was an immense help in onboarding founders to NEAR. With that being said, the expertise required to continue guiding the growth of the NEAR NFT ecosystem by strategically supporting the right projects is beyond the scope of the current NEAR Foundation grants program. From what we have observed in the past six months, the NEAR Foundation is focusing on some unproven future use cases of NFT technology, while inadvertently neglecting the community-centric NFT projects that prove success for future founders and users. This is important to note because while music and ticketing NFT projects will definitely be a big deal in the future, it is the community-focused PFP (profile picture) projects that garner the most user interest at this current point in time.

Case Study and Future Opportunities
For new chains to experience maximum growth, DeFi and NFTs should be regarded in the same manner. NFT startups are as investable as their DeFi counterparts, yet we rarely ever see NFT projects raise as much capital. In addition to that, it’s pretty standard to see DeFi ecosystem funds in place, but NFT ecosystem funds are scarce. The argument in favor of NFTs becomes more convincing when we study the growth of Solana over the past 9 months. In the specific case of Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana, it launched in September 2021, about 10 months ago. Since then, it has grown to become the #2 dApp on Solana with 213,000 monthly users. Magic Eden’s monthly volume is $111m (as opposed to Paras’ $369k), and the marketplace experiences 400,000 daily transactions. The startup recently raised $130m at a unicorn valuation of $1.6b. This was only made possible by the support and investment from the Solana ecosystem. The explosive growth Solana’s NFT ecosystem witnessed has onboarded thousands of investors to the chain. Plenty of VC firms are interested in the Solana ecosystem and have been investing in NFT projects for months. This has allowed solid projects to come to light and grow the chain’s user base. A good example of this is STEPN (https://twitter.com/Stepnofficial), the move-to-earn web3 lifestyle app that took the world by storm earlier this year.

NEAR NFT Ecosystem Fund Proposal
An ecosystem fund is an early growth stage VC-esque investor that aims to accelerate the growth of the ecosystem. Deliberate investments are made into teams that solve specific problems with the end goal of expanding the chain’s user base through shipping various applications.
We propose that the NEAR Foundation find and support experts in NFTs, and specifically NEAR NFTs, to run an ecosystem fund that will invest like a VC into the NEAR NFT ecosystem. This includes investments into businesses specializing in NFT infrastructure, on/off ramps, bots, gated utility tools, notifications, etc… in addition to investments into the right creators and communities to address the vicious cycle of lack of founder support leading to lack of liquidity we have described above.

The NFT space is diverse. It is impossible for the NEAR Foundation team to be experts and understand all the needs. This is why we need a sustainable ecosystem fund with expert researchers and members of the community allocating capital. Through a well-engineered ecosystem fund with a vertical specific investment mission of making the NEAR NFT space thrive, we feel that NEAR can have a vibrant and growing NFT community.

I could see this working if the fund managers had a process and pipeline to filter the insane flow of NFT creators and projects. Also important will be technical, marketing, and community skills.

Don’t call me the bad guy…

Let’s be honest there are a LOT of NFT projects with potential, but few with the work ethic, community building ability and proven skills to be successful.

An ecosystem fund should have returns and keep up with competitive funding needs across the entire crypto space, or they risk becoming irrelevant, or worse broke.

Identification, incubation and amplification are probably the key skillset for NFT ecosystem fund managers.

Speaking from personal experience, I co-founded a company building exclusively on NEAR to provide high quality NFTs in support of charities and impact orgs. We’ve been building for ~1.5 years and have watched the space deteriorate before our eyes. We received grants from NF but our problem was the lack of marketing and community building. Many NFT projects I’ve seen have the tech but are lacking in those two areas. I’ve also seen a slew of low effort, low quality get rich quick PFP projects come and go and the space is diluted in my opinion.

I’ve been extremely invested in the NEAR NFT space for quite some time now on a technical standpoint whether it be maintaining standards or creating contracts alongside Matt L. I think your proposal makes sense and I’m going to echo what Matt said above. For this to work, we need to filter the high potential, high quality projects and if they don’t have experience with marketing or community building, we need to figure out a way to help them. Support from existing platforms is also really important in my opinion. Building an inclusive and open community that lifts and amplifies other projects promotes a healthy, successful ecosystem.

All in all, I agree with everything you’ve said and I’ve been extremely frustrated with the space as well. Happy to help support in any way that I can.

Your points about lack of marketing and community building is right on the money. I also think there needs more connections with the NEAR audience via Spaces on twitter. I can see at least 4-5 Solana based Spaces going on and sometimes it’s not even well planned but based off the people that’s attending pushes other to join and interact. I actually though of an idea that would help push more members from our Community to be more vocal and open with one another but we need to have top projects as well as marketplaces to be cooperative. Thanks to @FritzWorm who is very active in the ecosystem; if it’s from Guilds, DAOs and @ConciergeTeam (which I’m also a member of); formed a group of select individuals that many should know in the NFT space to band together and help spread awareness to NFT projects who are close to launching their collection. If anyone would like to be helpful with this initiative known as #NFTcoNEARseaurs it would greatly be appreciated. This isn’t just a NFT issue but the whole ecosystem in my honest opinion. We have too many people worried about making profit instead of seeing the blockchain flourish and it shows. I see separation instead of collaboration and even if you don’t mess with one another often at least understand that there are bigger goals that we all have to understand and commit to. If members are seen as retain investors treat them as such just like you would in a department store. You need ambassadors and those at higher tiers who are there to rectify situations ASAP and if issues aren’t fixed then we all now bad reviews and less liquidity will flow into companies. Maybe there needs to be a team who enters select discords as “secret shoppers” to interact as well as analyze what’s going on and then give a review on them on Twitter which may push them to act accordingly in the future. Just a suggestion and it may be a lot but something needs to change dramatically or things will only get worse.

Quality projects don’t drive the high volume on other chains. It’s degen speculation.

NEAR has a culture of quality, which attracts quality. It doesn’t attract pump & dumps, and the founders who gave it a shot anyway discovered PND doesn’t work well on NEAR. Skyward is a FAIR LAUNCH pad, the opposite of what degens want. Could go on with examples.

If NEAR wants high volumes fast then it needs to make space for the degens. Because NF is venture backed itself, it’s hands are tied with regards to making that space. Even so, it doesn’t take much clever thinking to align some line items towards this. The hard part is a cultural shift to want those line items.

and…

If NEAR wants high volumes slow, then high quality NFT projects and forward thinking bets are the way to go. Incedently that fits with NEAR culture & aligns with the bear timing.

However, we already saw a season of the suggestion. Fast grants are/were “Deliberate investments are made into teams that solve specific problems with the end goal of expanding the chain’s user base through shipping various applications.” Why didn’t that work better?

Funds help a little bit, but incubation and mentorship go a whole lot further. Advisory work isn’t happening enough because it’s time intensive and hard to scale.

That’s how DAOcubator came to exist. It’s a phased program where projects receive microgrants and mentorship to achieve success. Folks who complete the phases are given a seat of power in the DAO (rather than a badge or certificate). It has scaled from 2 people running it to close to 10 DAOstructors who provide the mentorship and microgrants.

image919×505 70.8 KB

Yeah it’s a spreadsheet.

DAO formation is a requirement to launch an NFT project with TENK. All projects that submit hear they should take advantage of the DAOcubator program. It doesn’t guarantee success but it helps avoid the obvious, common pitfalls.

So YES, all in for smart funding of NFT projects & for me smart funding isn’t picking out good projects, it’s providing good projects with better support.

Hello Hello =) thanks for sharing and kick starting this discussion

antisocialstudios:

An ecosystem fund is an early growth stage VC-esque investor that aims to accelerate the growth of the ecosystem

I don’t think money is an issue, I mean by launching the collection you solve the funding for the project.

Ben:

We received grants from NF but our problem was the lack of marketing and community building.

Here I agree, we can identify two of the main problems: marketing and community building.

One way where we can help with marketing/promotion is by spreading the word using our own personal Twitter accounts in coordinated (organized) efforts. #NFTCoNEARseurs

With educational/informative approach and by quoting the thread with different micro-influencer accounts we can make the Twitter algorithm feature the thread so more users will see the information in their dashboards

There could be other initiatives, one I have been pushing to happen is that the Community could own and manage a Twitter account where we can run AMAs freely to invite NFT project leaders as speakers. We @ConciergeTeam have been waiting to see if this is possible with Near_Blockchain but it has been some time I think now we should create a main Twitter Account to run this spaces with the #NFTCoNEARseurs

starpause:

smart funding isn’t picking out good projects, it’s providing good projects with better support.

Totally agree, improve in our support as a community is the way to go.

Thank you for sharing this and I really like this idea! I agree with Matt here and think this could work with a proper structure in place to process and distribute support for all the NFT creators and projects.

I would like to highlight that 24 HR Daily volume metrics are extremely volatile even compared to token prices. For example, Ethereum NFT volume is up 29.16% and Solana NFT volume is up 39.15% per cryptoslam.io and Paras recorded $9,281.21 NFT Volume on yesterday (July 11) (https://stats.paras.id/). However, that does not take away from the overall conclusion and I completely agree that action should be taken to support the NEAR NFT landscape and mitigate current situation.

Incorporating a well-defined and scalable mechanism for amplification of high quality projects (marketing and community engagement) into the NEAR NFT Ecosystem Fund would make this a very strong proposal!

In my sincere opinion there are three factors that are the most influential to reach today’s situation:

1- Short exposure time of the NFTs boom.
2- On-chain liquidity
3- General market conditions

Let me explain;

1- I remember perfectly well that the boom of the NFTs in NEAR took place in the first days of January of this year, with mints of up to 5000 NFTs being sold in a matter of minutes, it was a very exciting moment that unfortunately lasted only a short time. Many people from the solana ecosystem and other chains came to NEAR just to mint these collections. But this stage lasted very little, if I remember correctly around fifty or sixty days. Which was not enough for most of the collections to demonstrate their ability to build new features and therefore many people from the previously mentioned ecosystems thought “There is no point in coming to NEAR if the teams are not going to develop something that is not in solana/eth/etc…” and took the decision to make a “quick flip” and leave NEAR aside.

2- As a consequence of everything explained above, we arrive at point 2. The less users there are in a blockchain, the less liquidity there will be and as soon as statistics show that liquidity is decreasing, the less people will enter an ecosystem. And that is what we are suffering today, lack of people. There are plenty of builders, that is more than demonstrated, but there is a lack of a strong community.

3- Well simply something we are all aware of, and which is also related to point 1. Ethereum and Solana had the full bull run to build features and new things that not only kept their users but also attracted new ones, NEAR on the contrary had very little time, and people in these complicated times, even though NEAR has sensational features and incredible quality, decide to stay or not to move from these already “established” chains.

How can we help to solve it from our position?

Connections, community support, community guidance and relationships with established developers and projects. As suggested by the authors of this post.

I don’t think we need more funding than the NF grant program. And I firmly believe that liquidity will come in in a big way when the market recovers a bit and NEAR is listed on some of the major CEXs. Go NEAR.

All valid points here imo. To recap, we’d need a VC/Incubator that would provide funding, incubation and mentorship (mainly addressing marketing and community building challenges).

I believe we should indeed pair the funding responsibility with incubation/mentorship, the model proves/proved effective for YCombinator and similar funds that have standards for admission and a model for execution and support between participants. Despite it perhaps not being the most optimal for effortless scalability: it works.

I do not think the NF can take on this additional responsibility as I’ve noticed they’re quite busy with their current duties.

Thanks for this post @antisocialstudios

Would like to share some thoughts:

1. I am not sure how simply creating an ecosystem fund dedicated to NFTs will solve the ‘problem’ of liquidity and engagement as laid out in your post without a thesis or strategy aimed at driving targeted adoption in a particular niche. NEAR Foundation disburses funding by giving grants to creators and connecting them to our network of VCs and investors if a project wants to raise further capital. The problem here is neither lack of funding nor allocation of funds – it’s more about the lack of alignment and what we collectively perceive as valuable to the ecosystem. That said, I am personally a huge proponent of the idea of more independent funding avenues in the NEAR ecosystem and agree that it’s necessary to build a self-sustainable economy.

2. Appreciate the Magic Eden comparison and would love to hear more ideas and case studies. Since Antisocial Labs is the the driving force behind the biggest NFT collection (ASAC) on NEAR by all-time volume, one idea could be to start thinking of a collaborative effort (let’s say a round-table discussion) between your team, other NFT projects (PFP, ticketing, gaming, metaverse, etc) with investors, representatives from the NEAR Foundation and all other stakeholders in the ecosystem to exchange thoughts on pain points, engagement catalysts, infrastructure components, visibility and resources.

3. There’s a need for constant experimentation – propose ideas, challenge assumptions, think out of the box and keep experimenting. The problems laid out in the original post above are natural in any early ecosystem. Let’s think of all possible ways we could collectively change things for the better – would encourage creators and projects in the ecosystem to try out all permutation and combination of collaboration we could possibly imagine within the NEAR ecosystem and even beyond.

4. Curious to hear some thoughts on why the projects, including yours were so successful in January-February and what has changed now that might prevent it. What were the tech and ecosystem-level factors behind it and what was the level of dependency on market factors, in your opinion. Several projects with the most sophisticated tech and cutting-edge utility have failed to take off in this space historically because of a lack of strong narrative and visibility.

All of this being said, we are all committed to supporting projects or teams that add value to the ecosystem. Please keep these discussions going, it’s very helpful for everyone to stay aligned.

Thanks for this post. The NEAR community should be more active on these forums to understand the challenges and discuss potential solutions together.

Building ecosystems is hard. There are a core group of ‘blue chip’ NEAR NFTs that have remained extremely prominent in the community, even through difficult conditions, and personally I thank you all.

As you have correctly alluded, the issue here is liquidity on the chain, and the seemingly difficult time the NEAR community has had in attracting interesting projects - the point I would like to understand, is where does this responsibility lie?

Magic Eden is a great example. I don’t think I am qualified to comment extensively on the Solana ecosystem, however I do think the market place is responsible for attracting and moving inventory.

If we look at Amazon, they are responsible for attracting customers to their marketplace, and with the customers, comes volume.

The NF has supported several marketplaces in the ecosystem, and I think with patience, some of this support will reap the rewards - perhaps there needs to be some kind of consultation group formed to understand exactly what is needed, but I am not sure an NFT ecosystem fund is the answer.

I believe the team are building out an NFT specific strategy, and the community should have input on that.

Thanks for sparking what should be an ongoing conversation.

FritzWorm:

#NFTCoNEARseurs

Thanks for bringing this discussion to the table and clearly addressing the state of play for NFTs on NEAR. Some excellent comments and points made which I would like to add my 2 cents.

For reference, we are building Few and Far, with the vision of delivering a Magic Eden for the NEAR ecosystem. With my experience building in the Solana ecosystem, and meeting the Magic Eden team at the start of their journey. It has been clear that ME have been a huge catalyst to the success of NFTs on Solana. In August 21 they had very little volume and Solana was just starting to grow its NFT community. The ‘white glove approach’ launchpad and excellent community + marketing was a core element to their success. Now they have a $150m+ war chest and a $1.6B valuation! ME has a lot of support from Solana to build community and marketing, plus investments. Recently ME announced its own venture arm, taking primary responsibility of investing and growing the gaming ecosystem on Solana. (Solana NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Launches Gaming Venture Arm - Decrypt)

Who better than ME to assess the top quality projects, provide marketing and community support and make investment / grant decisions. They are the experts and can incubate the ecosystem. This also allows Solana foundation to play more of a back seat knowing ME can drive the ecosystem on their behalf! Plus co-invest I am sure knowing ME will be in a. better position to pick the winners.

NFT Projects choose Solana to build on due to the reliability of the ME launchpad and liquidity+community reach it offers. Just the same effect as Binance Launchpad bought to early token launches. Technology aside, projects will take a huge risk to build on NEAR today without the community, liquidity and suitable marketplace. (we hope to solve certain areas here with Few and Far)

Now lets face it, timing is everything. Solana ($SOL) had a huge run, and the shift to Solana came when ETH prices and minting costs were at all time highs! ME times their entry well and have been able to build lasting community and liquidity.

With Opensea on Ethereum, and ME on Solana, the recipe for NFT ecosystem success seems to be a concentrated marketplace, delivering excellent tools for creators and game studios, and combined community providing deep liquidity and easy access to funding, or ability to purchase top IP (e.g. Top Shots) to kickstart the NFT ecosystem on NEAR.

The solution is not to just throw more money at the market, without a strategy and all correct pieces in play. We look forward to solving this together as a community and competing with leading NFT ecosystems in the future.

Thanks for bring this topic up. It’s something I have heard complained about in multiple places. For me, there are a few things that come to mind when considering this issue.

First, we can all agree that NFTs in general are in their infancy and not even close to their full potential. Additionally, NEAR with its smart contract based wallet is in a unique technological position to push the boundaries. There is a lot of innovation that can happen in the NFT and smart contract space (for example, 30% of the transaction fee goes back to the contract) but a bunch pfp only project won’t cut it. Those are starting to struggle everywhere.

The overall meta of NFTs is constantly changing and lately it’s been a race to the bottom. To try to fund potential “hot” projects will never work because the window closes too fast.

If the NFT project is trying to build utility or a product and is possibly worth funding, then the person/people doing the reviewing need to be able to evaluate the feasibility of the build, marketing, economics, and team ability. Very few people can do these kind of reviews but a committee could certainly put together an initial pre-screening tool that put teams into categories and potential skill groupings which might help at least remove poor projects more quickly. This is asking a lot of a group of people.

Also one of the biggest issues I believe that projects on NEAR are dealing with is true marketing. NEAR could do better marketing and the projects themselves could also work harder on this. Marketing is not a Twitter raid or spamming another discord. As this down market continues, you can’t ship to a small and expect success. You need creativity and audience building.

Then there is the marketplace situation. The user experience needs improvement. The tools and options for creators needs improvement. The 1/1 artist need better options. There is tremendous opportunity but it can’t just be a copy of a copy. There needs to be innovation and real creativity to expand the marketplaces, which can help provide better exposure for projects.

It’s so early for everyone still, but how money is invested makes a difference. You can’t keep just throwing money at a problem. You need to actively seek out projects, properly vet their ability to execute, help them with how to go to market, and then help them try to be successful with marketing, connections, etc.

Lastly, for NEAR to act like a VC arm for NFT projects is likely tricky because they are a non-profit. ROI would not be measured in dollars but adoption. NEAR needs less of a VC setup and more of an advisor, biz dev, and solutions setup. Someone(s) who can actively be part of the process and mentor/support vs just signing off on a grant.

I was reading through the comments and I felt like it might be a good time to bring up a project our team is working on. I think we offer something unique that addresses a lot of issues. We’ve been operating pretty low-key while we built the platform and developed our marketing strategy but you can check us out at https://allskills.ca. We’ve recently brought on a few team members that haven’t been added to the site, and expanded on our Ambassador challenge system but most of the info is accurate.

Our teams’ combined skills and experiences include social media marketing and athlete management, videography and content creation, programming (front-end, back-end, and everything in between), graphic design, talent recruiting and business consulting, and an Olympic gold medalist with connections to other pro athletes.

AllSkills started out as a vision to create a community centred around competing, encouraging physical activity, and sharing displays of incredible talent. Blockchain wasn’t a part of the original plan until we realized how various blockchain technologies could help us provide features that couldn’t previously exist, and allow us to create a system that rewards both creators and consumers of content in unique ways. All while costing less to operate and providing an avenue for exploring community ownership/governance. So much potential.

At the core is our 1v1 Challenge system, Ambassador Challenge, and GM Mode. These 3 pillars combine community curation of user generated content, access to top athletes/IP and fan engagement, physical activity, artistic expression, competition, earning potential, and additional uses cases for our users’ NFTs. Both pros and amateurs have shown a lot of interest so far. We’ve also been able to network with various pro agents and managers to better understand their marketing needs which has helped tailor our system to be even more attractive to them and their clients.

NEAR stood out to us mainly for its potential to offer a smooth experience for users. Our target market is fairly broad so being able to seamlessly onboard inexperienced crypto users is important to us. I also think there might be potential with the sub account system to create a parent/guardian controlled account system with allowances and restrictions on withdrawals as a way of managing underage users. Something I’m exploring.

We’ve been bootstrapping this and will gladly accept any advice, help, tips, suggestions, etc. Specifically any help regarding community building would be appreciated as we’re ready to start putting more energy in that direction. We’re about to submit our first grant application which would also really help us move to the next stage.

We have a working app and are launching our closed beta to friends and family on the testnet in a couple weeks. We decided to go the route of progressive web app (PWA), meaning no App Store involved. Making it a smooth experience across many devices has been challenging but it’s coming together.

P.S. If anyone from Endless.fm reads this, or knows any of them, we’d love to explore a potential collaboration.

antisocialstudios:

NEAR NFTs were doing well at the start of 2022.

Yes, it’s true that at the beginning of this year NFTs were doing really well on Near, but I think that was largely due to market conditions and also the token price of $NEAR.

If you look at the token price of $NEAR at the beginning of the year, it was around $15 and had reached its ATH at around $20. There was a lot of excitement in the market and people were hoping for the next Solana. That was exactly the time when we had more NFT sales than ever and when almost every NFT project was sold out. Because let’s be honest, in the end, it’s all about making money and the token price plays an important role.

II don’t remember anyone talking about Solana or Solana NFT projects when $SOL was still at $3. But when Solana cracked $20 and later $100 more and more projects launched on Solana. When $SOL even cracked the $200 mark and many investors made over %60,000 profit, almost everyone was talking about Solana as the next Ethereum and the NFT projects just popped out everywhere.

The same is true for $NEAR. I think that as soon as we are out of the bear market and $NEAR recovers and reaches new ATHs, that interest will come back from retail.

Despite all this, I think Near could do more in terms of marketing support.

I think the #NFTCoNEARseurs initiative by @FritzWorm for example is very good, where we try to push NFT projects with threads on Twitter.

However, I think it needs more than just community initiatives and that’s why I agree with you, we need more marketing support for projects, especially NFT projects, from Near.

chronear:

ticketing

When it comes to NFT ticketing, @guille and I will be there. Let me know if you plan to do the round table.

This is a fantastic write up! The report outlines the critical state of the NEAR NFT ecosystem, the events that led to it, and a plan to overcome. Thank you @antisocialstudios or starting the conversation.

Looking back at the last 7 months, there are important lessons learned that can help us improve our strategy for the future. Funding support from the NEAR Foundation was a major contributor towards the growth of the NEAR NFT ecosystem. Many NEAR NFT projects are developing applications and building communities that add real value to NEAR Protocol.

It is clear that a thriving NFT community is extremely important for the growth and adoption of a smart contract blockchain. Sustained funding from the NEAR Foundation is +EV for NEAR Protocol if the resources are going to the right place.

However, if funding is not distributed effectively it can cause more harm than good. When “fast grants” became the norm for funding new NEAR NFT projects, the wrong behaviors were reinforced. New projects were fueled by short term hype with no follow through or any tangible plans.

When it was evident fast grants were not an effective means of funding, the NEAR Foundation stopped distributing funding to NEAR NFT projects almost completely. This wasn’t healthy either. The NEAR NFT ecosystem went through two extremes and it is no surprise that growth halted. It is critical that a trusting relationship is re-established between the NEAR Foundation and the NEAR NFT community.

At this point new NFT projects see launching on NEAR as too big of a risk. Access to well structured grant funding will give developers confidence that they will be supported while doing the work to bring mass adoption to NEAR.

Replacing fast grants with milestone based grant funding is the best way to maximize the growth achieved per dollar. Is a big undertaking to manage the workload attached to milestone based grant funding. A dedicated fund or guild of experts responsible for vetting quality projects and managing their milestone based funding could be a great solution.

More important than anything else, leaders of the NEAR NFT community must come together and reignite the partnership driven environment that catalyzed the growth of NEAR NFTs in the first place. I suggest using the #NFTCoNEARseurs Telegram as a hub to gather the NEAR NFT community. From there we can plan an ecosystem partnership on a scale that has never been seen before.

Right now investors outside of the NEAR ecosystem do not care about what any individual project is doing. However, if all NEAR NFT Founders, Influencers and community members are promoting a singular narrative people will notice.

This is incredibly well said @joe-rlo! You nailed it

It just occurred to me, and I wanted to quickly mention this before I forget too:

Ethereum counts with large companies that release NFT-related products to a broad audience (eg: Louis Vuitton to release new NFTs | Vogue Business). This initiative could add some focus to these kinds of projects too.

Love this thread. As the founder of a marketplace I’m trying to solve this problem myself. Our plan currently at UniqArt is to build a strong community first.

We have been actively targeting the Indian Diaspora (very similar to what Paras did in Indonesia). Majority of these people are first time crypto users and I firmly believe onboarding them straight onto NEAR is a very smart way to build and increase our community. Although, these new users will contribute to high volume, low price NFTs but overall it’ll be a win for the ecosystem.

We’re also focusing on incubating new projects and communities to generate awareness and increase presence on Social Media. Overall, I feel instead of figuring out how to migrate people from other chains to NEAR we should focus on the other 99% population that still hasn’t had exposure to Crypto. Given the right amount of push, we can get many traditional investors/traders to give Crypto/NFTs a shot. Also, instead of finding degens, we can create our own army of new degens. It will definitely be a big task and responsibility, but as the founder of a NFT marketplace in an untapped market, I’m willing to make the extra effort.

I’d love to know what all of you think about this strategy. I’ve been giving it a lot of thought and this seems like the way to go for me.

chronear:

Curious to hear some thoughts on why the projects, including yours were so successful in January-February and what has changed now that might prevent it. What were the tech and ecosystem-level factors behind it and what was the level of dependency on market factors, in your opinion.

This . Mistakes are learning opportunities. Everyone learns together if we share case studies of things going sideways.

Crypto is a nascent space. A map of pitfalls and clever thinking around them will get us a lot further than pointing at something successful and skipping towards it.

antisocialstudios:

The NFT space is diverse. It is impossible for the NEAR Foundation team to be experts and understand all the needs. This is why we need a sustainable ecosystem fund with expert researchers and members of the community allocating capital. Through a well-engineered ecosystem fund with a vertical specific investment mission of making the NEAR NFT space thrive, we feel that NEAR can have a vibrant and growing NFT community.

Is this a gap that Antisocialstudios would be willing to fill if:

A) Given the opportunity

AND

B) The support from NF is granted and clear?

while music and ticketing NFT projects will definitely be a big deal in the future, it is the community-focused PFP (profile picture) projects that garner the most user interest at this current point in time

Out of this entire post, this is what stuck out to me the most. I’d respond with just a few questions/challenges:

1. The PFP NFT trend is one that is very much driven by speculation. There may be PFP “communities” here and there that offer their holders benefits that go beyond exclusive “alpha” discord channels and access to even more speculative assets in the future, but those seem to me to be few and far between. To what extent do we want to support this trend?

2. If music/ticketing NFT projects and other similar and practical use cases will definitely be a big deal in the future, isn’t that what we want to invest the bulk of our time and attention towards innovating? If we go this route, aren’t we just playing a different game (the long game), vs just trying to hop on a bandwagon that overemphasizes short-term speculation as a primary driver and that is destined to be short-lived once the more pragmatic use-cases have been proven?

There are many ways to attract short-term liquidity. One of those ways is to invest in trends, since the likelihood of short-term success may be greater if we’re catering to a trend that has generated a lot of buzz. What this approach doesn’t do is guarantee long-term sustainability. It also doesn’t necessarily support innovation, since it’s an approach that is largely reactive and not one that is looking to challenge trends by looking forward to the long-term potential of alternative use-cases.

corwinharrell:

One of those ways is to invest in trends, since the likelihood of short-term success may be greater if we’re catering to a trend that has generated a lot of buzz.

This is absolutely true. Have we considered that NFT volume, the majority of which I assume are PFP projects, has simply collapsed across the board, too?

It’s not an excuse, and I do think there’s more that can be done. Namely because the communities which emerge from these PFP NFT projects can, and have, grown to become pillars of the wider community.

corwinharrell:

To what extent do we want to support this trend?

NEAR TVL would benefit greatly from more degen speculation of FT and NFT. I don’t think it’s something NF can stand for, but through an arms length ecosystem fund it could work. Seems there is consensus that funding only helps a little and that a little bit of funding is better than none. I’m in favor of a small grant enabling a lot of excitement.

For the long term play, which is where I see the strength of NEAR, it’s an entirely different game. Sweatcoin style progressive, custodial onboarding is going to bring the billions of users to web3 and make todays TVL concerns look quaint All those users will be showing up to nothing if the existing communty dies out before then.

NFT Hype Cycle (1)960×540 36.1 KB

I am hugely grateful for this thread - very insightful and constructive. Thank you, to all of you.

What I am reading loud and clear here is, “we need someone (or a group) to help lead the path and take this on”.

@antisocialstudios, are you willing to take this on? Should we get in details on what an ecosystem fund with several functions could look like to address the points raised here?

Hi all

Well…this is a discussion that has been going on within NEAR for pretty much the whole of the last 18 months of my time in the ecosystem…and probably well before that. (Maybe with the exception of the the January/Feb explosion in interest/transactions)

The “MagNFTify” telegram group set up a year ago was brain-dumping ideas to turbocharge mainstream adoption of NEAR NFT’s on the back of the BAYC summer…and while there were lots of good ideas…both long-term and short-term…nobody was really invested full-time in delivering…which makes the ASAC @antisocialstudios “Y Combinator” style proposal interesting:

http://gov.near.org/t/antisocial-studios-identify-incubate-accelerate/

TENK have been the key NFT innovators on NEAR…and really should be involved too… if it suits them.

Personally…I believe that the opportunity/issue is multi-faceted…which probably suggests a broad spectrum approach is required…and that many things are probably true at the same time…rather than in conflict:

• NEAR should be focussing on NFT innovation and long-term sustainable programs/solutions that increase adoption of Web3 - ticketing, sweatcoin, mintbase redeemables etc.
• NEAR should also probably be sensitive to dominant high volume trends…which the PFP/NFT communities have clearly been for the last 12 months . These ‘trends’ may be short term…or they may even be the sustainable long-term future for onboarding the next 1bn…
• At the same time…NEAR has ground-breaking technology…maybe it should also look to promote/support ground-breaking original culture that epitomises a mature confident blockchain ecosystem

So…yes…how about a dedicated body with overall full-time responsibility for a unified NFT strategy…with divisions underneath it for separate verticals…but as @starpause says in the linked thread above…“The scale of work that goes into running a program along these lines is massive.”

Anyway…all a good discussion

Hi @markieke.flament We would also be willing to assist.Actually we are finalising a multi million dollar fund (outside of NEAR) to support future NEAR NFT/GameFi Projects, which will be supported by the team at Few and Far, to help grow the ecosystem, attract the best teams to NEAR and better compete with other chains.

This is a great thread - just want to add specifically from the GameFi angle… @marieke.flament

we are currently building a gamefi middleware layer for mobile games on Near (Unity based SDK with the Near Wallet embedded in it + other monetisation functionality for game developers like competitions) to mass onboard mobile games to the Near ecosystem via simple SDK.

We picked Near due to the awesome wallet for web2 users, but when you look at other chains - they are very well set up for supporting and mobilising gamefi projects

1. team of people from gaming - designers, developers, artists who can help with the game itself… as much as the blockchain piece
2. easy to find central gaming contacts - whether its to discuss grants, game design support, connecting you within the GameFi ecosystem
3. having a clear vision for where they sit within GameFi - eg focus on AAA games? mass casual games? Mobile? PC?

Having a gaming BD person is not enough unless you have the team behind it to help bring these projects to life - i think of it like mobile games publishing. You have a lot of choice between mobile games publishers to fund your projects, use your tools, the ones you choose is often about the people and add value they will bring in terms of game knowledge.

Keen to help here our really build and grow a clear gaming proposition/product/launchpad - already had some chats at Consensus with the folks at Few and Far how we could team up.

Thanks, Marieke. We really appreciate the response.
We’re processing all the encouragement and feedback from the community.
We’ve started working on a proposal with key functions defined in detail and would love to share it when it’s ready.

antisocialstudios:

For new chains to experience maximum growth, DeFi and NFTs should be regarded in the same manner. NFT startups are as investable as their DeFi counterparts, yet we rarely ever see NFT projects raise as much capital. In addition to that, it’s pretty standard to see DeFi ecosystem funds in place, but NFT ecosystem funds are scarce. The argument in favor of NFTs becomes more convincing when we study the growth of Solana over the past 9 months. In the specific case of Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana, it launched in September 2021, about 10 months ago. Since then, it has grown to become the #2 dApp on Solana with 213,000 monthly users. Magic Eden’s monthly volume is $111m (as opposed to Paras’ $369k), and the marketplace experiences 400,000 daily transactions. The startup recently raised $130m at a unicorn valuation of $1.6b. This was only made possible by the support and investment from the Solana ecosystem. The explosive growth Solana’s NFT ecosystem witnessed has onboarded thousands of investors to the chain. Plenty of VC firms are interested in the Solana ecosystem and have been investing in NFT projects for months. This has allowed solid projects to come to light and grow the chain’s user base. A good example of this is STEPN (https://twitter.com/Stepnofficial ), the move-to-earn web3 lifestyle app that took the world by storm earlier this year.

New and intelligent ideas must be created for the NFTs market, where they provide quick solutions to the many problems that exist in the community.
Establish the mission and clear objectives for which the NTFs were created.

What is solved with this NFTs idea or project, (what solution does it bring to the community)?

Good marketing

Example,

Ideas on how to solve by means of Nfts

Logistic problems, by means of image recognition of Nfts

Product mobility problems.

People mobility problems

Hey @zeitwarp

Thanks for sharing these insights. We would also like to share our experience with this,

zeitwarp:

The “MagNFTify” telegram group set up a year ago was brain-dumping ideas to turbocharge mainstream adoption of NEAR NFT’s on the back of the BAYC summer…and while there were lots of good ideas…both long-term and short-term…

We were one of the guild coming out from “MagNFTify” to connect the NFT ecosystem. Our success was acknowledged when the Paras Team has appreciated us back in November 2021 by stating that “our presence helped the community to grow and connect”

NEAR NFT Club Guild Monthly [October] Report

Great job! I really like the weekly update, pretty much sums up all the cool stuff that happened that week. There is a lot of stuff you guys did, and it really helps the artists grow and connect with each other, kudos!

NEAR NFT Club Guild Monthly [October] Report

Thanks to NEAR NFT Club team as one of our partners in the NEAR’s NFT space, Paras has reached out to a bigger audience more and more every day.

and just after a month since January’22. The Tenk Team played an important role in bringing the NFT Collection Communities to NEAR, supporting them via Consulting, Marketing and Launching Collections.

• We have been working in the ecosystem since a year and believe us the team behind the TENK has always empowered the individuals/communities supporting the vision and values of NEAR.
  
  

  image931×484 26.5 KB

We would love to see TENK Team leading this initiative too.

Hey Naveen @NearNft …
Yep, shouldn’t dismiss your contribution. Your team have been pushing the NEAR NFT narrative across genres for a year now.

Hi NEAR fam,

Last week we successfully launched fewfar.com, a new marketplace on NEAR. If you have not checked us out please do so as we would love any early feedback to our beta.

We have been getting some great early reviews from the community which we are very happy about. https://twitter.com/NearGuru_/status/1554214048681558018

We are working closely with the NEAR BD team to win over some very large IP and projects with massive web2 + web3 audiences and the pitch is working well.

We are confident this approach of providing a curated launchpad, supporting the marketing of new projects will attract new NFT audiences into the ecosystem as well as essential tooling to support the projects. With the pitch, we have now brought 10+ new projects to the ecosystem and building on NEAR.

Our NFT Gallery widgets are also gaining traction from large publishers such as Coin Telegraph, to promote NEAR NFT collections to the mass market web3 audiences and increase sales. This type of innovation has not been seen before in the NFT space.

Looking forward to collaborating further with all the NFT Projects here on NEAR plus bringing onboard some ‘chain defining’ IP to jump start the NEAR NFT ecosystem.

If we can help at all or if anyone wishes to collaborate you can reach me at c_heyw00d on Tg.

Nice intiative,I also agree that most NFT suffer from marketing and community building.
An NFT project can have good vision and tech like most utility NFTs do but without having a strong community, they look ass compared to the pfp community that the community is strong.
If an NFT fund grant was to be passed we’ll need to work the way y combinator works, grants/funds will be provided but also guidance/a boot camp is needed to teach how to community build and market!
Or just directly help them.

Important post, which covers a good proposal with thoughtful guardrails, but the discussion has spent more time on liquidity mechanics than I think is useful.

IMO we don’t need more supply of NFTs, we need more demand for them. It seems the default way to do this is to try and drum up a bunch of hype and speculation, which is basically what drove the NFT boom before. That relies on bull market energy, spendy whales and hedge funds.

This is a bear market and that was the last cycle. That same toolkit won’t work. There’s little to no intrinsic value in the PFP or collectible markets* so they rely on massive community building to keep up novelty, excitement and prestige plus they’re totally limited to web3 native people and their money.

Let’s be real – if a project doesn’t have a competitive advantage in this kind of community building, it needs to find another way to create demand (eg partnering with big IPs) or it should pivot to something closer to real value creation. They have to make something people actually want somehow.

Ticketing, loyalty, gaming and other utility areas that touch web2 are more interesting targets for this because they’re (theoretically) better at creating reasons for users to stick around and keep the NFTs so they’re less dependent on a fickle niche market, plus they bring in net new users and net new economies into the ecosystem. This is particularly useful on NEAR because it was designed from the start to be better at onboarding normies than any other chain.

The responsibility for success really goes back to the founders of projects – what is your unique competitive advantage? What are your brand partnerships? How have you created exclusivity and hype in the past? If you haven’t, I honestly encourage you to shift gears and focus on solving other problems that tie closer to a real consumer demand. It’s extremely hard to create a net new IP with enough demand to sustain a market so how can you partner with others to piggyback theirs or to solve a “picks and shovels” problem that helps many others unlock that kind of value for themselves instead? Let’s make sure that anything getting funded can answer those questions too.

What’s going to drive this ecosystem isn’t manually helping art creators sell out hypey collections, it’s figuring out how to reach millions of new people or generate millions of dollars of real value using NFTs. That requires solving the upstream onboarding problem to make it seamless for web2 people to start playing and solving the downstream utility problem which creates reasons why they should try to play in the first place.

The next crop of billion-dollar companies that flower in the next bull run are going to come out of solving that class of problems and those are the problems that NEAR is best suited to solve. Let’s devote our time, money and creativity to solving them.

Hello a quick question
How can we know a legitimate NFT project on Near protocol.
Or can random people just start an NFT project on Near? Is there any certified NFT project.
Cause there’s a new NFT project on Near (near coin flip) and I want to be sure if our money is safe to invest on it or any other NFT project thanks!

Tonyesy:

Or can random people just start an NFT project on Near? Is there any certified NFT project.

Hi Tonyesy,

There is never a sure way to verify if a project is 100% legitimate on any protocol across the NFT space or even DeFi space.

There are steps you can take such as verifying founders tenure and involvement within the space. Verifying if the founders are doxxed to either a 3rd party entity or to the foundation itself. Speaking to the founders and seeing how responsive/open they are about different aspects of the project.