An overview about pumpamentals and some of the barriers that are holding NFTs back from mainstream adoption.
The echo chamber barrier
NFTs led the way on the frontlines of this cycle, but the vast majority of the world doesn’t want to have anything to do with them.
People are not scared of how the NFTs landscape actually looks like, because, in fact, they haven’t even taken a look at it.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Esther Duflo explained very well in Good Economics for Hard Times how echo chambers work, and they are surely the first barrier we need to overcome in order to achieve a wider adoption.
Essentially what happens with echo chambers is that when two (or more) groups of people find out they have different ideas over the same topic, instead of having a respectful discussion about it, they start to question the other group’s moral integrity; each individual of the two groups doesn’t want to feel a bad person and instead of arguing, simply decides to stop talking to the other group and start interacting only with people with the same beliefs.
Often precluding ideas only because they are different from yours is the beginning of radicalization.
At the moment there are three groups: anti-NFT people, NFT people, and people that just don’t care or that don’t have an opinion.
The echo chamber anti-NFT people are in is strong, and it will only become stronger as time goes by, because of course the more time you spend defending your idea, the harder it will be to change it.
Their argument about NFTs is mainly ‘they are not environmentally friendly’, and even though it has been debunked several times now, their mind likely won’t change.
They feel legitimized to say whatever they want because they are theoretically defending the environment, thus making them more aggressive and less open to change.
NFTs bros are instead more harmless, being a minority.
Their echo chamber is more about trying to convince themselves the newest generative collection is somewhat peak art performance and not just a speculative ERC721, rather than trying to impose vehemently to other people NFTs as the future of countless sectors.
The usefulness of NFTs will eventually become so necessary that no echo chamber will stop them from being integrated almost everywhere.
At that point we are probably going to witness more reckless behaviour by the last of the anti-NFT people, that will not affect in any way NFTs adoption, because the very issue right now is not the complaints and the false statements, but rather the fact that these complaints come from the noisiest group of consumers.
As soon as the amount of people with no strong opinion about NFTs plus pro-NFT people will significantly flip the amount of contrarian herd, the latter will not even be taken into consideration from producers.
It’s ultimately all about money.
Below are quoted a few explicatory lines from The Sovereign Individual by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg; that can be easily applied to the NFTs argument.
While adherence to the civic myths of the twentieth century is rapidly falling away, they are not with their true believers. Many humans are belongers, who place importance on being members of a group. Everyone who came of age in the twentieth century has been inculcated in the duties and obligations of the twentieth-century citizen. The residual moral imperatives from industrial society will stimulate at least some neo-Luddite attacks on information technologies. In this sense, this violence to come will be at least partially an expression of what we call “moral anachronism”, the application of moral strictures drawn from one stage of economic life to the circumstances of another.
Beyond the echo chamber barrier
But what can NFTs offer to the average retail investor? Where do new people go to get introduced to NFTs?
It seems right now the mainstream part of the NFTs space pivots around generative collections, and the average talk is not ‘look how beatiful that is’, or ‘how useful that is’ but rather ‘look for how much I flipped that’.
Similar to the whole crypto space in general, NFTs too are higly speculative assets.
What goes on the news is the new BAYC ape bought by Eminem for 460k$, rather than how we would be able to own our in-game items with NFTs adoption or many other useful things.
And that is completely normal.
Vast majority of consumers are dumb and live their life on autopilot.
When you hand them better solution, already battle tested and ready for adoption, they will not even question them.
That is the second biggest barrier we need to overcome.
Once the echo chamber is wiped out, people will understand that NFTs at the moment are usable almost only as highly speculative assets when it comes to generative collections, and proper art pieces (intended as something pleasing to see) when it comes to 1/1 pieces made by the artists that are flooding the space thanks to the many advantages.
NFTs lack the infrastrucutre needed in order to get a worldwide adoption, starting with blockchains themselves.
They are either too expensive, not reliable because of downtimes or not yet ready for many millions of users.
You simply can not ask to the average consumer to do things with long hex addresses, nor to pay for every action they want to do.
We need to oversemplificate the whole.
Will it be done in time for the crash of the echo chamber? Maybe, and in this case, NFTs will gain widespread adoption almost instantly.
How is the situation right now?
One can look by himself/herself.
Imagine yourself as someone new to the space, what do you do? search for a place to see, buy and sell NFTs? what’s the first thing to pop out on your browser? OpenSea.
So you take a look at the top five collections:
What you see is unopened red beans selling for 15k$ and the ugliest apes you ever seen selling for 80k$.
Where is exactly the art everyone was talking about? Is this just pure speculation?
It is, in fact, just pure speculation.
NFTs are being mainly promoted as ‘art’, and while it’s easy to make literally everything fall under the ‘art’ category, it is quite clear the vast majority of collections have a mediocre artistic value.
It is almost the opposite of rational actors; irrationality is the undisputed sovereign.
You decide to give NFTs a shot, you’re dragged into the frenzy that lies underneath making money.
But what should you look at? The art? The community? Some kind of roadmap? A combination of all of this?
I do not pretend to be neither a good NFT collector nor trader, so I am not going to give an explicative answer to those questions.
But I have recently noticed an increasing return to be made going full retard mode.
Sometimes being retarded pays off
Lately a new category of foundamentals sent some projects to Valhalla: the ‘pumpamentals’.
Underneath the pumpamentals there are memes. Good pumpamentals are simply an high probability for a collection to become a meme in the NFTs space.
Recently we have witnessed different collections (or in one case single traits) gaining popularity thanks to a disrputive memetic power.
The first to come to my mind are: Milady Maker, frankfrank and Kevin trait from Pixelmon Generation I.
All of them have peculiar characteristics, that make them collections hit in full force by the irrationality of this market.
Milady Maker
Miladies are a clear example of how the demiurge of an NFTs collection that thrives is always the community.
Miladies are not ugly, yet they have an extreme memetic power due to the community fully embracing the schizo vibes.
Looking backwards there were quite a few signs that a collection like that could have thrived, above all the fact that the community just vibed with their milady as pfp while the project was sitting at 5k pieces unminted and a floor slightly above mint price.
Memes going around and strong community were certainly a good entry reason.Kevin from Pixelmon Generation I
Kevin differentiates himself from the rest because of the very intrinsic characteristic he has: he is a trait.
Pixelmon reveal was shameful looking at what they promised and then at what they delivered.
BUT, the 117 Kevin were so ugly they almost instantly became a meme.
People wanted to have what was the trending topic on the TL, and the floor price for a single Kevin rose above 4 ETH, while the floor for the rest of Pixelmon’s species tanked.
Kevin still holds a floor price of 3 ETH at the moment I’m writing this, while the rest of the collection has a floor of 0.25 ETH.
There might be a reason for this: the majority of the people that bought him above 4 ETH can afford to throw that amount at Kevin, without getting it back.
It’s another level of mental illness.frankfrank
frank is a what would come out from a milady and a Kevin having a child: an ugly ass schizo mf.
The memetic power was tangible since the beginning:
unique ugliness
unique schizo vibes
unique and innovative way to communicate through a discord bot: translating ‘frank’ written with a variation of capital letters into Morse code and then to regular text and vice versa.
The original and distinguishable way to communicate was the most important factor in their success, you could scroll your timeline and randomly see countless tweets filled just with ‘frank’ over and over again.
Interesting and retarded, it is taking over, buy.
But pay attention, be careful to differentiate a community being retarded for genuine fun from a community being retarded in order to dump their bags on you.
If you are early enough though, you can profit either way.
- erla