Whenever you try to fit offline, traditional business models and cultural perceptions into online economies with new behaviors, you invariably come up short.
The biggest upside, the largest shifts happen when you work with the innate potential of technological capabilities where they mashup with changing cultural behaviors and individual consumer reflexes.
This will play out to be true in the blockchain collectibles, digital art, and gaming segments.
A year and a bit ago, everyone was abuzz how with Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), we would move the massive, dusty, legacy collectibles market onto the blockchain. How economies are just better in games with tokens as the currency.
Felt like the rationale that since we can, we should. That somehow market potential was an expanding mirror of what is happening offline.
I don’t see it that way.
Strategies like ‘Everything that can be tokenized will’ are good for T-shirts, poor for most everything else, especially describing market potential.
When you work within your vision of a different future, when you create out of what is innate and native, you invariably speak to something fresh, something new and visceral, and just maybe, something market changing.
If our concept of digital objects are static NFTs, unique and secure things that can bounce around the web and have value because they are scarce, this is not very interesting.
The most user-friendly wallets and easy to use NFT exchanges will not make them any more so.
When you look to what Axiom Zen is foreshadowing with CheezeWizards, and what brilliant, scrappy, early startups like Wildcards and Last of Ours are moving towards, you get a glimpse of something quite different.
What was previously a centralized platform or service becomes a series of atomic, programmable, dynamic objects, carrying their own active behaviors, touching others, and reconfiguring cross this new Web 3 landscape.
I like that Axiom Zen is obsessed with the idea of interoperability of the ecosystem, letting developers add to objects, accessorize them, engendering a cascade of new connections, emotions, and value in pop-up niche communities.
I love the idea of composability, where you can code the concept of extended ownership into a unique object, building value by creating a new composite set of objects and pools of currencies that comprise a reshaped, reorganized extended whole.
I’m fascinated by the possibilities of objects carrying their social and economic personality through an annuity of support for an artist, a cause, extended game play.
And I am impossibly stuck on the idea that these objects, the companies that build them, the communities that support them, can be environmentally impactful by nature, though for profit from the start.
That through this stack of dynamic, programmable qualities, we are able to create new business models. Ones that are decentralized by nature, socially beneficial by design, emotive as their allure, and profitable by their very fiscal DNA.
Just maybe, if we look into the nature of NFTS as a malleable and codable wrappers of storified things, we don’t see baseball cards or static art, but a community thread of new connections and reemerging unique communities with organic commerce as part of its backbone.
Similar to the way a great idea, spreads across the web creating flash communities as it goes. Or the core essence of a Kickstarter campaign even, where there is a collecting point for the funds, but no platform except everywhere cross the web for the supporting communities themselves.
Possibly what we have here in the object world of non-fungible things on a burgeoning Web 3 is a reality where what we thought of static collectibles, and what we experienced on game platforms, merges into something brand new.
Where the distinction between a collectible and a game, simply evaporate.
True with a twist for what we want from native digital artists and collectives, as well.
More dynamic. More atomic. More malleable. More personal and emotive. And more powerful.
This is a market to get behind.
I’m seeing inklings of it happening as unencumbered thinkers, out-of-the-box artists, and creative developers learn to grab these new possibilities, iterate, and mold them in open, excitingly messy, and impossibly rich markets.
This, unlike so much of the crypto and blockchain world, is not waiting for infrastructure to be real. It’s more like a new art form or music genre, incubating in small projects, in an infinite number of places cross the world.
All bubbling up.
This to me is a thought worth mulling over, to work with, to invest in, to build communities of support around.
