We have hit a wall with NFTs. The word is out. You either love or hate them. But whichever side you fall on, you feel like you know what they are about. And it's either for you or not. Of course those who are writing off NFTs already, are sounding a lot like the people who dismissed the Internet as a fad back in the 1990s.
Yet, even as a convert to NFTs and the potential of web3, I can understand where the hate is coming from. It's like when the Internet only had a few web pages and you had to get access by getting "minutes" on a physical CD. The infrastructure of web3 doesn't exist yet. It forces you to use all of your powers of imagination as to what the space could look like once that infrastructure is built out. Leaving value to the power of imagination alone looks an awful lot like speculation.
But I just ask myself a simple question: Will people's lives become more digital in the future? Or will people start abandoning technology. Will the Internet become the fad that it was predicted to be in the 1990s? If you think people's lives will be more digital than they are today, then that is a vote of confidence for web3.
But if web 3.0 is the destination for mainstream adoption, we will start needing more than imagination and speculation to get us there. This means we need innovation. We don't need cryptopunks version 47. We don't need 394 different flavors of monkeys. We need honest innovation that unlocks the next chapters of this story. We need NFT projects that make people go "oh, I never thought of that." We need NFT projects that move the needle and start filling in the wild imagination of early adopters.
This brings me to a new wave of NFT projects that are standing out. Projects like Azuki NFT, an anime inspired PFP project that comes with a blue chip pedigree and an ambitious roadmap to match. Azuki started out as a series of anime inspired characters and a promise for future metaverse integration. Its members have worked for Marvel and Disney before, and what they are looking to accomplish is directly related to that path. Instead of designing characters that raise the stock prices for Disney shareholders, these creators are looking to mint original IP that will fund their own vision that they will be able to control and profit for. No longer putting their hard labor in for the House of Mouse, they are out to make an impact for themselves. This is the promise of web3. Digital ownership that many can participate and profit in.
The Azuki NFTs quickly shot to the top of the NFT rankings and their floor price quickly vaulted out of reach for most. Which makes their recent offering intriguing. They have just "fractionalized" one of their IP's core characters, a bean farmer named Bobu, and offered those fractions at an affordable mint price for new members to join the community. There were 50,000 such fractions minted and they went fast.
Azuki is promising that the Bobu fractional NFTs will be an experiment in project governance. Effectively creating a DAO based around one of the characters in their world. It's like if JK Rowling suddenly decided that Hagrid was going to be owned by the fans and offered shares of ownership in the character. Holders of the fractional Bobu NFT will be able to vote in the community to help decide the direction of the character. The projects roadmap lists ambitions to create animations, games and even films around the Azuki universe, and Bobu's fate will be fan controlled. This is having a stake in the game. And as word of the project moves forward and sales of the fraction continue to rise, they will keep generating more funding that goes towards fulfilling their future ambitions. It's a brilliant marketing move that has brought more attention to the Azuki brand, and has also lived the spirit of web3 by giving those who missed the initial wave an affordable entry point into the project. It's a show of innovation that could be adopted by other out of reach NFT project like Bored Apes, should they look for ways to acquire new members in a future wave of the project.
It's still early innings for these projects, but every time one project decides to try something new, the whole space can learn and benefit from the attempt. And hopefully, we will see more of these properties taking risks and trying to add new innovations to what they are offering. One of these days, someone will add a new use case that will serve as the springboard to mass adoption of web3. We are still playing in tech savvy, early adopter spaces. But with every new attempt, the mainstream gets a little closer. Innovation is the only path toward opening the floodgates. Because everyone who already cares about NFTs is here and content. It's the 99% that need to get excited about this space, and so far, they haven't seen anything that gives them enough FOMO to join. Yet.
