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The thorny road of NFT in Asia

老雅痞

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The first thing we need to eliminate is the prejudice against the word "domestic".

原文标题：《亚洲 NFT 的荆棘之路》

Original author: Old Yuppie

This article is from wechat official account:Old yuppie

Carnival in the NFT market

In 2021, NFT has achieved remarkable results. By the end of 21, it has a market value of tens of billions of dollars. In 2021 alone, its market value has expanded hundreds of times compared with 2020. Many traditional consumer enterprises embrace the NFT market and use NFT for marketing. Audi released five NFT models based on the new Audi A8L series. French luxury brand Louis Vuitton has launched an NFT game, and Nike has acquired Rtfkt in the NFT space, a startup founded in 2020 that creates NFT for sneakers and other collectibles.

Since the beginning of 2022, a large amount of Asian capital has also begun to flow into the NFT market. In recent years, some well-known NFT series with Oriental elements have emerged, among which we are familiar with Cold Rabbit, Ali, Jay Bear and Azuki. Until this past week, the market was also in a party with Moonbirds and some social NFT passes.

But the various parts of the world because of reasons of the regulatory environment, development is also each are not identical, some worthless NFT fired at a high price, in the current NFT market regulation under the condition of relatively poor, this is worrying, NFT market still exists which constraints and driving factors, further in-depth study.

Domestic PFP NFT pain

From the top of the domestic light of the halo was born, to the end of the whole network group mockery left. Ali team with their own step - by - step strategy, for community members in February staged a unique "drama".

On February 15, 2022, Ali Series NFT, a well-known IP project in China, was launched. Subsequently, a technical flaw in the project was exposed, allowing users to access the corresponding metadata and pictures without opening the blind box. The most ridiculous thing is that on the top right of NFT Mint's official website, Connect, originally used to link ethereum wallets, was misspelled as Collect. It is not surprising that this kind of elementary mistake caused the whole network group to laugh. Then broke out whitelist incident, Mod called for shipment incident, Opensea off the shelves storm, let the domestic NFT reputation fell to the bottom.

Operational crisis

Projects like Ali are really outstanding in the outreach phase, with community building, member feedback and community privilege covering everything. But when users flocked to the site with expectations, they saw the words "pictures for reference only" hanging on the wall, replaced by inaction, passive management and chaos.

Under this kind of operation, the floor price presents the parabola general appearance is afraid not to be expected.

The Chinese nation is a nation with centripetal force, which is vividly reflected in the NFT market. In the NFT market occupied by a number of foreign projects, cold rabbit, small ghost excellent projects as soon as they entered the overseas market won a very high heat, which is inseparable from the pursuit of Chinese people. At that time, the white list of these domestic projects was "hard to find". Coupled with the official strong publicity, the limelight temporarily such as blue chip. Even cold rabbit in the highest heat, and BAYC together known as the "west monkey east rabbit", but now the situation, let people sigh.

Domestic Alpha NFT community chaos

In addition to avatar NFT projects, several teams have published other types of NFT----Alpha community passes. But there are also a series of problems in the market.

A previous NFT community called Alpha Shark Rug has been Rug. The NFT of this community used to reach the highest floor price of 20E, which was called the top Alpha community in Chinese, but now it's 3.5E. At first is due to the founder of building community in December when the large-scale false marketing, claims to team consisting of various industries elite, scientists and the Olympic gold medalist in silicon valley, etc., as long as to buy their NFT can join the private club, at the beginning of the NFT simultaneously oversold to members of the special welfare, Alpha message, to lead everyone to the path of common wealth and freedom. Most people believed their false promises, the price of NFT generated fomo sentiment in the secondary market, and finally the total sales approached 2000 aether, and light royalties exceeded 100eth.

The reality is that most of the benefits promised to community members have not materialized, and some of the hot project information has been transported from other communities, resulting in a gradual demise of the community.

Many well-known NFT players have published community NFT Passes. I have also surveyed the industry's superior Alpha communities to provide excellent sources of information. I am not going to list them here, and I believe that NFT players are well aware of this.

However, the real measure of the value of a community is not the number of members but the value of information in the community. If the information in the community is inferior and overflowing, there is no significance for investors to buy. The price of an NFT can rise or fall depending on the value that community members receive from it. When members' purchases or sales are recorded on an immutable blockchain, it makes it more discernible and efficient for us to identify clubs that are marketed as "top Alpha communities".

Asian NFT offshore issues

Overseas professional investment institutions and senior investors are not inclined to choose domestic NFT due to policy considerations and incompatibility of cultural attributes. Some Of the Asian NFTS have been relegated to the back seat in their minds, based on failures and market feedback.

And this will undoubtedly cause a vicious circle, itself lack of capital and environment of domestic projects, due to some inferior project team eager for quick success and instant profits, eager to leave as soon as possible arbitrage, and loss of credit endorsement. This situation will not only hurt themselves and users, if it goes on like this, it will even radiate to the whole domestic project circle, and set up an insurmountable high wall for the development of future projects. And that's not what we want.

In fact, we are not breeding high-quality projects, now Burst into blue chip Azuki team also has Chinese figure, in the author's opinion, cold Rabbit, little Ghost at the beginning of the online are quite excellent projects, fully have the potential to become the Asian blue chip. Perhaps due to deviations in operation or strategy, the project has gradually lost its luster recently, which needs both reflection from the project side and warning from the latecomers.

How do high-quality blue-chip NFT projects capture the attention of both Eastern and Western collectors?

1. Cultural resonance

We've been thinking about the problem is, based on the great age of Web3.0 environment, everyone is in the encryption domain digital natives, no gender/race/color/country, in the form of anonymous in various social networks, actively involved in the different NFT community culture, that we also need the spread of its culture and build? It has been argued that too much emphasis on the cultural differences between East and West NFT will enhance cultural opposites and limit the ceiling height of the project.

In fact, the author believes that every blue-chip NFT project has its own series of cultural attributes of the community. Members have formed a unified consensus based on art forms and culture, and are active and collaborative in the community.

The culture of BYAC's boring ape, for example, is rooted in its narrative of a future in which everyone gets rich from cryptocurrency trading, but is incredibly boring. As a result, these apes often wear faces of discontent and boredom. BAYC's cultural background, in a sense, represents the early cryptographic native culture. Ordinary people flood into this crazy growth industry and become rich. BAYC's community first develops and expands its community ecology slowly based on the form of consensus of cultural background.

In essence, Mfer represents the anti-elite culture. Our generation of young people has entered the Web3.0 era, in which we no longer believe in the so-called elite authority and have a stronger sense of sovereignty, equality and subjectivity, which is similar to the self-deprecation of the Internet slang "Diaosi" in earlier years. Now belongs to the young social individual underlying representation, a power imbalance between individuals and society as a whole from the individual helplessness to strengthen, also makes the web 3.0 decentralized authority (to) the idea of young people in the encryption industry planted the seeds sprout, long immersed in the virtual network world user empathy with mfers characters, This is almost inevitable by accident.

The example of BAYC and MFER essentially shows that in NFT's community cultural attributes, we need to look for specific community members who have a certain consensus and understanding of the vision of the project itself. If this consensus and narrative coverage is more extensive in the crypto world, it will attract more attention from the market.

Asian culture is infused with western elements

A combination of Asian culture and comic style: Azuki

Azuki has an aesthetic style and Oriental elements. At the beginning of its birth, Azuki used a large number of east Asian secondary market and European and American mixed memes in NFT design and Twitter. Tsang believes that Azuki has captured "the rebellious culture of skateboarders", which is well connected to NFT and the crypto culture. Asian investors also snapped up expensive Azuki NFT.

"My hunch is that they're Asian and they're seeing art that really resonates with them for the first time," said Zzzagabond (Azuki creator), who was born in China. "I've had several conversations with Asian investors and they tell me this is the first NFT they've bought."

Azuki's success is nothing more than a backlash against some investors who have a bias against Oriental elements and Chinese participation in NFT projects.

The author used three successful examples clarify the community cultural differences, this also shows we are not able to be "Web3.0 world, don't need any cultural label" limit, each NFT cultural background is not the same, what has the different user groups and consensus building, so we need to find is conform to the community culture group, Create community ecology together.

Second, the narrative

The ability to tell a great story is a cornerstone of success in cryptography. But stories alone are not enough. You need to engage your community in the narrative. Each member tells multiple related community stories, making the overall story clear enough to spread outwards.

Narratives are made up of all the stories about a project that crystallize into what people think and say about the NFT as a whole, and the narrative around an NFT is similar to its reputation or brand.

This is hard to do, however, and requires the right amount of seeding under the guidance of the team and its core supporters. However, when it works, it is a powerful driver, and its positive effects increase over time. The longer people believe in a community, the more likely they are to believe something about that community.

In a world of rich narratives and complex choices, you need to build a world so rich and engaging that others will want to spend time in it.

The narrative of the boring ape

Bored Ape Yacht Club has captured people's attention and imagination all year, and they recently narrated the grand narrative of the future in Deck: the Unified Meta-universe. They believe that the true metasomes have stories that people are fascinated with and want to engage with; People can find targets, place bets and make important decisions, from big acquisitions of CryptoPunks and Meebits to the planned launch of metascotic land and the launch of ApeCoin, all of which signal that Yuga Labs is making BAYC the front and center of this new metascotic.

Each BAYC community member tells a story about Yuga Lab, which forms a narrative around the projects that gives them enduring power. They build worlds that other people want to spend their time on and provide clear story building blocks.

Azuki narrative

Azuki calls its game plan a "mind map" and says the project's vision is to "create the largest decentralized brand for the community-built and community-owned metauniverse." Physical goods such as streetwear and collectibles will eventually be released and IRL events will be held to celebrate the success of the project. The company will then attempt to bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds through a variety of interactive experiences and games, captivated and inspired by the community's narrative of Azuki building the first wave of the Meta Universe IP.

Community narratives work with incremental decentralization, creating context, telling the original story, and then giving way. It may feel uncomfortable, and it's not for everyone, but in the competition for attention, the winners are the communities that are willing to relinquish control and let the narrative take on a life of its own.

Third, community building

Firstly, the purchase of the same series of art works proves that users have established a certain consensus on artistic aesthetics and narrative background. Based on this consensus, community members naturally have a sense of belonging with others. Meanwhile, members discuss and communicate in the exclusive club, which gives the holders additional social capital. Every community has something in common, a desire to belong, a common vision. Success in NFT can be greatly influenced by the community you build and its quality.

PFP project is a great test of the operation ability of the team. Good operation will enhance community members' sense of community identity, and then let more community members voluntarily contribute to the community. At the beginning of the community building, there must be a number of core members of the community, how to arouse the enthusiasm of members of the community for the community ecological ecological contribution, and grants them a generous returns, this is one of the major problems of each project team should be thinking, in the process of building long-term community, will go through a process of "wash" community, in the process, It will purge members who don't fit in with the vision and atmosphere of the project, and essentially they won't be able to forge consensus with the rest of the community.

The project side can also encourage members to participate in community activities and hold a series of innovative activities such as offline parties, second creation of works, comic story design and so on. The enhancement of community cohesion will further promote the value of NFT, and the emotion of outsiders eager to enter the community will become stronger, resulting in the community Vibe. To some extent, community VIBE is positively correlated with the productivity, vitality and sustainable creativity of the community.

If Asian NFT hopes to attract the attention of the world, the community needs to spread its own culture and narrative to the outside world. The team can also hold some AMA with European and American NFT communities and participate in their NFT community activities, so that we can learn NFT products under different cultural backgrounds together. At the same time, I will tell them the logic of NFT story construction, so that they can further understand the products with Oriental elements. If they are not promoted and spread abroad, they will only be stuck in their own ways with limited development bottleneck.

How does NFT work with Asian culture fit into the world?

In order to promote a culture to the outside world, there must be something that can resonate with the other culture, that is consistent with the mainstream of the other culture, the mainstream of human culture, at least something that can be recognized by young people around the world.

Cultural output depends on arousing others' interest in learning about NFT, and starting to actively seek relevant information to understand this NFT. That's how you get attention, so the core of cultural output is to get people to like you in a different cultural system. If he doesn't like it, the team doesn't do anything.

In the aspect of modern tide culture, some cultural products of Japan give us some inspiration. What is the widespread culture of Japan? Comics, adult movies, games, all very enjoyable to watch and play.

Therefore, before promoting NFT works mixed with Oriental culture to the outside world, the Asian team can also do some research on the buying thinking of Western collectors, participate in their communities, dig out the underlying emotions and visions, and carry out in-depth communication with them. Finally, after careful consideration, is this series sought after by modern young people? Is there a broad consensus? Will integration with Web3.0 lead to innovation?

A really good NFT project would dilute cultural boundaries and allow a wider range of people to participate, allowing the walls of cultural difference to evaporate.

But the first thing we need to eliminate is the prejudice against the word "domestic".