In 2020-2021, there was a spike in interest in NFTs. Essentially, this meant you could own something digitally. Why would one need to do that? No one really knows. The "decentralized" utopia was upon us.
During the pandemic era, we were often stuck at home. This resulted in a mass of people consuming whatever was online. Every internet trend, bad news story, celebrity cancellation, and NFT project was thrust into our faces.
I actually dabbled in NFTs. I figured I should hedge a little, as I might be missing something. I knew a couple of artists personally who had made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short period. Some even made millions.
The two NFTs I sold, I also gave the owners garments from Chomp. I included notes with each one. The retail value in USD was something like $500 per piece.
My audience was smaller then, but I still felt incredibly gun-shy about having the Chomp name attached to NFTs in general. While there were plenty of qualified artists making crypto art, I thought the biggest NFT projects were largely uninteresting—and much of the crypto art was downright hideous.
Crypto art was not a meritocracy; it was marketing. While that’s probably true of almost all visual art, NFTs were almost exclusively about hype.
Many of these companies sold NFTs on the promise of something bigger later—a movie, a show, a toy collection, a "community." A few of them even delivered on that promise. Though the vast majority have tanked, adding negative value to their token owners.
Honestly, it's hard to run a profitable company. I imagine it's 10x harder to kickstart one from scratch with thousands of internet-addicted investors frothing to make a profit.
In retrospect, this era of the internet was a waste of human effort, and we'll likely regard it as Beanie Babies for internet users. For every millionaire made from NFTs, there were countless losers in the space. Scams, rug pulls, fraud, and straight-up theft are the norm, not the exception.
As a creative, my job is to add value to the world. As a business person, my job is to satisfy my customers.
NFTs flipped this on its head. The incentives were the opposite. To its participants, it became solely about money. That's why it failed.