Beyond the PFP: Engaging Your Users with NFTs

Transcript

[Music] hello okay perfect all right thank you all for coming uh my name is tom borgers i'm the founder and ceo of three mint we build web3 tools for brands really enabling brands to use nfts distribute them etc while removing a lot of the complexity it takes to deal with web3 and nfts so today what i want to do is kind of review a little bit where we stand with nfts where the market is and really ask ourselves the question of what comes next and what fundamentally are nfts

good for right so context is everything so let's start by steeping ourselves in a little bit of data to kind of ground us in this conversation right so you can see here on the chart uh basically the whole nft market uh since its inception roughly uh you can see an orange that's actually the transaction count volume and in white that is the usd value volume right and you can kind of bookend this with the the cryptokitties uh spike here on the left at the end of 2017 and on the right here the other deed uh land sale and so when we look and double click into this volume there's kind of three broad categories that come to the fore right three main buckets of activity

being pfps gaming and art and when you double click further you really see that it's pfps that have dominated especially in this top 50 collections right accounting for about uh two thirds of the volume with gaming coming after that at about a third and you can kind of see the the top ten here um some very familiar names and in here i'm including things like nba top shot in the gaming category right so uh the the big question for us when we think about nfts is what really motivates the purchasing and the volume that we see in the nft markets why do people go out and buy nfts and you know we would

posit that it's really these three key ingredients number one status signaling so i buy something and i want to show it off because you know it's cool number two this pretty deep inherent uh need for us humans to belong to some kind of tribe or community or group and then number three investment or speculation and of course these things can work you know very much together uh especially you know with nfts you have kind of the financialization of these first two categories right and now you know we have these three categories what is actually the primary motivator well according to uh some studies it is perhaps unsurprisingly the the profit

motive right the the need or want to make money and so that begs the question were nfts good investments right uh i think we all know some stories of questionable decision making when it comes to buying nfts either from ourselves or our friends um and you know as a category when you look back over the last six months for example and you see the top 500 600 collections there are only about 29 of those that are profitable and this changes kind of day-to-day so this data is like two days old but roughly speaking you know this is what you get and of course that is in eth terms so when you account for this in usd that number gets cut in half basically right

12 months you get slightly better performance but still i think the takeaway holds um and it's not just you know all collections this also happens at the very top with kind of the the blue chips of nfts not doing super super hot at the moment um and another kind of interesting takeaway here is that in the top ten you know you do get slightly better at uh performance on average than the next 25 collections but of course this is uh post fact so a little bit hard to um account for this uh before the fact um so you know if you're trying to to pick nft collections that do well it is a little bit difficult

now i just want to point out that kevin is not part of the next 25 or the first 10 but i had to fit him in somewhere in the presentation so here he is um so nft performance is unevenly distributed this brings up the question was it all a scam and we would say no because nfts really served a pretty important purpose and that is to bring in a lot of new users into the space and kind of revive this conversation around web 3 and why it's important to kind of control your assets and really have ownership over those assets right and you can see it in the data when you look at the total active addresses on ethereum as a whole over

the period of say 2021 and then you compare that with the data from openc in terms of active addresses and then total addresses you see there's a pretty big amount of overlap and just looking even more broader than that there were actually 30 million wallets that traded nfts total over 2021 so served a pretty big an important purpose right so we have kind of this this data that shows us not a great investment but at the same time we're getting a lot more new users and so it's a good time to kind of reflect and ask ourselves what are nfts good for um what is web3 good for and where do nfts kind of play

a role in bringing about uh web 3. and i think it's important to kind of go back to basics a little bit and think about what is web3 this may be very familiar for some of you but i think it's important to kind of go back to xero we think web3 is really about creating a trustless ownership layer of the internet right creating an internet where you own your data your assets your identity and um you know historically when we think about crypto we talk about cryptocurrencies right your fungible assets like ethereum bitcoin stable coins etc things that govern the transfer of value

but a lot of the things that we own a lot of the data that we interact with uh the data that makes us us is actually non-fungible right it refers to uh you know specific unique data and that's where nfts come in as these records of ownership these digital property rights over unique data and what's really powerful with this is that we're kind of able to move from a model where it's account based account based models of data to a model where we're going to this universal ledger where we're all interacting on top of the same universal ledger right and for a brand for example what that means is that you can verify that a

particular user owns asset x or has the right to why and that's incredibly powerful and you don't need to you know make a request to another entity to get that data right you can verify that data independently yourself and that obviously facilitates a lot of use cases collaboration etc and so you know now we're kind of in this transition period where we're going from nfts that are purely products they're outputs to thinking about nfts more as inputs into a whole range of new use cases right and that opens up a lot of possibilities and what i want to do with the rest of my time here is kind of

touch on a few of these possibilities that we're seeing particularly with brands right for brands there are really three core ways that we've seen nfts be particularly useful that's number one building more invested communities number two token gated commerce and number three leveraging a new direct distribution channel so a little bit more info on that right when we talk about number one here with nfts you're now able to provide real ownership to your users right so your customers now become proper stakeholders that means aligned incentives between brands and the users and that means that you can really turn

your customers into your most avid ambassadors by you know creating unique experiences and products that are purely designed for them shifting to token gated commerce we kind of continue this where you know not only can you gate and then unlock your e-commerce store and all the connected experiences around that to your community but you can also make it accessible to other communities right communities of complementary brands and other creators that you'd want to collaborate and work with it's easier than ever now with nfts to basically um introduce this model where you can you can target and promote to a superset of my fans being my brand's fans and your

fans together right then finally um and you know these first two categories may seem a little bit skeuomorphic still but what's super interesting and exciting to us is that a lot of what we're seeing being built uh in web 3 by brands and creators um is also at the intersection of what we've been calling the metaverse right so this is still fairly you know abstract and disjointed version of the metaverse um but the real promise for us you know when we think about the metaverse is that it is this this new experience where your data is portable and persistent across the various different ways to access and experience

the metaverse right and fundamentally that's really what web3 is about and what it is you know able to enable um and so for a brand practically speaking what that means is that you have this new distribution channel called the metaverse and it's built on web3 rails and so that that means that you know brands can really do two things one is extend the life and the scope of their ip in this new channel in the format of nfts and number two it means that in this world where you know everyone has wallets you can reach and target customers based on the nfts that they hold in their wallet and you can do that directly and direct customer acquisition dollars into those wallets right it's a

much more direct interaction with your end user so you know when you when we think about nfts what's interesting to us is it's the it's the connector the key that enables all of these different use cases and a lot of brands are already kind of interacting with this and experimenting with this and we at three mint are really enabling that by building uh this set of tools that you see here right so we at three men are really building what we consider to be the building blocks uh for interacting and engaging with web3 as a brand and so if you are one of them if you are a brand uh we would love to talk to you we have you know already

worked with quite a few and have some really interesting case studies to share so please do reach out if you are a developer please again reach out to me we'd love to have you use our tools um and you know especially if you're super passionate about these kinds of tools and really having a part in creating the set of tools that are going to bring in or have the potential to bring in you know the next 100 million the next billion users into web 3 then we would love to work with you so please reach out to me at tom threeman.io also on telegram tomborgers please find me there and thank you very much for listening hey thank you you said we can reach and

we can target and reach users based on nfts um like it's really hard to target but how would you reach users how do you reach wallets yeah yeah so i mean that's a really great question and that's something that i think a lot of people are working on like epns and others in terms of how you actually like message and notify wallets i think that's what you're referring to today the way that that happens is still somewhat manual right like typically you're filtering or trying to target a specific subset of wallets that say hold board apes right or hold crypto punch so that's fairly easy to filter and target but then beyond that you know the way that these things work today is typically you're working with that community in their discords to kind of

let them know about this but what we hope to do is work with you know folks like epns or xmtp i think um to kind of leverage the infrastructure that they're building to automatically target now this is very much in a web 3 context the reality is that for web 2 brands they're typically linking wallet addresses to emails or basically issuing wallets that are tied to emails already right so i think it depends a little bit what the context is a lot of brands want to still control that relationship with the customer and so they will require something like an email yeah good thanks alrighty thank you very much you