Crypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)

Crypto Valley Live (ID: cryptovalley)

, Author: Jarrod Dicker, translation: Jeremy, reprinted with authorization by Odaily.

Where and how to enjoy NFTs, especially for non-holders, is largely non-existent. While this is a problem, it makes sense. The ground-breaking idea behind NFTs is that unique digital objects can be confirmed for ownership. Thus, the initial set of applications are those directly involved in buying, selling, and storing. We need marketplaces to buy and bid on, and wallets to pay for and hold our purchases. These are experiences that emphasize the private and personal nature of NFTs. But as with physical objects of ownership, this transactional aspect is only part of appreciating an item. For any object with utility beyond immediate necessities and security, its value is socially created. We understand its value in terms of what the wider community thinks it has. Right now, the community that values ​​NFTs is just the people who make and buy them. To get a sense of scale, the top 25 dapps all combined, not just those related to NFTs, probably had less than 250,000 transaction wallets/users in the last 24 hours, of which nearly Half are in Dapper's Top Shots. For NFTs to reach their true potential, we need to build consumer experiences further afield. And in order not to repeat the mistakes of the current digital age, we need these platforms to maintain a decentralized spirit.

When any asset starts to accumulate greater recognition and deeper social significance, its value will transcend the main transactional nature and move towards a symbol of the owner's identity. Its value goes beyond the actual product and puts the value down to the owner himself. With this socialization of value, society begins to associate value not only with products but with people as well. This is true in the physical world, where identification with something you own is not the same as identification with something you rent, lease, or borrow. This is also true for NFTs. But none of this will happen on a large scale without NFTs reaching out to and being adopted by wider society.

The creators and owners of NFTs certainly know this. They want as many other people as possible to enjoy and contribute to their products and properties. Owners want their property to be known, used, loved and, increasingly, remixed. The fact that non-holders can also consume NFT content does not mean that owning them is worthless. Quite the opposite. For example, if an NFT is minted for a specific moment, the more that moment appreciates, the more value the asset tied to that moment will accumulate. In fact, owners of works of art have always benefited from public display and reproduction - because the appreciation of artworks/media/collections makes them more valuable, because widespread reproduction elevates the status of "authentic" and original; because widespread Communication leads the market. This contributes to the development of its culture. Reproducibility is a feature, not a bug.

As such, owners of NFTs have a vested interest in ensuring that a great third-party consumption experience exists, especially when their ownership is evident and drives more transactions, incentives, and engagement with creators. Wider dissemination may even drive new genres and creations based on owned projects, similar to the genre of hip-hop (a culture of remixing original works of others), and the evolution of EDM, from Chicago dance music to EDM to Europe. All these remixes make the original creator more valuable. But this requires NFTs to be experienced first. Only widespread consumption can further promote the transformation of NFTs from digital assets to cultural heritage. When we create great applications to share NFTs with this wider group, allowing them to consume them, and we do the same, the effect will be revolutionary.

Unfortunately, those nice non-owner experiences are almost nonexistent these days. For NFTs of art and collectibles, the user experience so far has included marketplaces, social posts to promote sales, some data-driven transaction ranking sites, and crypto wallets. We have the NFT equivalent of an auction house, media for professional art buyers, and systems to manage transactions. All of these are for buyers or collectors and investors for bidding and trading. These are not the environments that maximize enjoyment. We're missing experiences like museums, concert halls, theaters, and fashion shows walking down the street.

This metaphor should not be taken literally. Thanks to the nascent "cryptoworld", there have been some admirable attempts to build 3D museums and galleries. But unless you're a true VR enthusiast, you probably haven't been invited to experience it, nor delighted by it. These spaces are inconvenient to browse, oppressive and empty, and fail to achieve the core goal of any NFT consumer application: to instantly connect users to the media they are most likely to enjoy.

So what should those experiences be like? Well, for one thing, they might not be that different from our current user experience of exploring and consuming media on phones and other screens. Whether you're visiting a website, marketplace, or chat app, NFTs should be integrated into the experience. Each application will have a different way of displaying NFTs to consumers depending on its purpose. If it's a player for NFT songs, it might let you listen to or navigate by genre or most popular songs. Or like Zora.fm, which just lets you swipe to find something you like, maybe gets algorithmically smarter about what you like, or lets you create a profile of explicit interests. (More on those valuable and dangerous interest data later).

However, there are also some essential differences between the consumption of NFTs and the needs of the NFTs ownership ecosystem. The first is that owners of media assets should be recognized. By giving the owner her own revered status in UX, we make them an important part of the creation story. This increases the value of ownership and thus the fees an artist can charge. At a time when we've traditionally milestone labels and studios, and by extension the oligarchy of the big corporations that own them, we can instead honor small, entrepreneurial collectors. Maybe not just the current owner, but the first owner, the one who took the initial risk to make the investment. It also makes sense to be able to see what else they have, or have had in the past, and enjoy it. Of course, the owner does not have to be an individual. They could be fan groups, buying clubs and collectives, perhaps made up of a formal DAO structure. This could change the structure of the relationship media companies and platforms have with creators and consumers under the value proposition of “ownership.” In this way, the DAO's current and past media ownership can serve as both a playlist and a sort of index fund.

The second difference is the importance of links to deal opportunities, both opportunities to bid on or buy that asset, as well as opportunities in related assets. Someone who likes NFTs in the direction of comedy might want to bid on an NFT, which is a collectible ticket to an upcoming performance by the comedian. This need not affect the pleasant consumption experience. The app is fully optimized for non-holders while still providing a smooth path to purchase and collection. An interesting thought bridging these two differences involves owners possibly wanting to promote NFTs they own more prominently, not unlike a featured post in the context of social media. Rather than explicitly paying the app for promotion, the owner may “stake” the NFT, contributing the resulting revenue to the app. This may be a meaningful amount. As we have seen, high-value NFTs generate huge economic flows.

Thanks to the malleability of the NFT standard and the unbreakable relationship with the creator, the consumption experience can provide functions that media applications do not have today. A song can have lyrics provided by its creator, visual art can reveal its underlying connotations, and a dance can contain a tutorial. Pieces, as programmable entities that respond to external stimuli or the presence of other NFTs, can change over time. Assets that are part of a multi-artist collection can be linked to other parts of the larger collective, and perhaps to other items with similar properties. Consumer experiences can also take inspiration from gaming concepts. NFTs can 'compete' against each other in competitions and tournaments: dance competitions, rap battles, summer countdown songs, jury choice movie awards. Prizes and publicity will flow back to owners and creators. We will also see NFT displays designed for public spaces, restaurants, shops and clubs. Venues may even generate revenue from digital purchases as we gather in person again.