Wang Feng: Fifteen Observations and Speculations on the Quiet Evolution of the NFT Trading Market Over the Past Year

Original Author: Xiao Yin Yu Lian (Wang Feng)

The author was responsible for computer antivirus products and the digital entertainment division at Kingsoft before 2007, and later founded Blueport Interactive, focusing on game design, production, and distribution, from PC games, web games to mobile games, until its listing in Hong Kong in 2014. In early 2018, he entered the cryptocurrency field, founding Consensus Labs and Marsbit. In 2021, he joined the product team of the Element NFT trading platform and promoted the incubation of the metaverse platform PlayerOne.

This article briefly outlines fifteen aspects of the current NFT market, trading protocols, community governance, aggregators, and public chain ecology. If you patiently read through, you will understand the key intention of this article: the changes that may or are happening in the NFT market.

1. The Road to Crypto Version of Ebay

Let’s revisit the growth path of OpenSea. Eighteen months ago, few outsiders had heard of OpenSea. Today, its market value has skyrocketed tenfold, joining the ranks of the $10 billion club. Crypto investors often compare it to the dominance of Coinbase and Binance in the cryptocurrency market.

Choosing is more important than effort, but sticking to the initial choice and persisting is even harder, especially in the temptation-filled crypto market. The development history of OpenSea seems like a "fantastic drift of the crypto faction." In September 2017, the ERC721 protocol and the CryptoKitties project had just emerged, but due to the high concurrency of games on-chain at that time causing the Ethereum network to crash, the project failed, and imitators quickly withdrew. OpenSea was born to meet the demand but did not thrive, and until September 2021, the NFT market remained in a long hibernation. Adventurers setting sail for the great voyage may not have expected that they thought they would at least reach the southernmost tip of the African continent, Cape of Good Hope, but instead sang "all the way north" and ended up in Greenland. It’s hard to imagine how strong their team’s insensitivity to external stimuli was, walking on what seemed to be a very niche market path at the time, and how they survived the past five years in the crypto market.

• The concept of Blockchain public chains was hyped up

• The Bitcoin fork farce

• The illusion of Dapp multitude

• The battle of spot and contract trading platforms

• The suffocating crypto bear market

• Filecoin's resurgence in mining

• The rise of Uniswap

• DeFi Summer

• Algorithmic Stablecoins

• Axie igniting the GameFi market

Over the past five years, while you sang, I took the stage; in the crypto theater, it was not NFT that took the center stage. OpenSea maintained development and operations with a small investment, gradually gaining favor from investors, until it became highly sought after. The two core founders were ordinary engineers from Silicon Valley giants, with no prior experience in cryptocurrency, but they persevered through the grand vision of a crypto version of Ebay, cutting through obstacles and avoiding distractions and temptations, much like the Long March.

2. Contributor List

Social platforms played a huge role in greatly promoting NFTs beyond their original circles, allowing more people to participate, voice their opinions, and showcase their works. On a global scale, the NFT that broke through layers of barriers still occupies the top of the crypto field's hot word list, surpassing the influence of blockchain and Bitcoin.

With this, I subjectively provide a contributor list for the 2021 NFT market. I did not mention Axie Infinity because its NFTs did not appear in the mainstream public chain NFT trading market. The following ten individuals are noteworthy:

• Jack Dorsey and the Twitter he founded; I have always believed the market underestimates this unruly person, just like Elon Musk.

• Beeple, The First 5000 Days, and the person who paid $69 million.

• CryptoPunk, which predates the ERC721 protocol, actually inspired Dapper Labs to design the ERC721 protocol. I still hold a few avatars that cost me 400 ETH.

• Bored Apes and Yuga Labs; my experience is that whether in Web 2.0 or Web 3.0, never underestimate any ugly yet unique face; in an era of technology-driven face-swapping and computer graphics, it will inherently become scarce.

• Dapper Labs, the founders of the ERC721 protocol and CryptoKitties, laid the foundation for their NFT world; the Flow public chain was built by their team as a gaming public chain.

• The great NBA and the exciting moments of Topshot; the NBA's brand status is unparalleled, and their entry into the NFT market will undoubtedly have a huge effect.

• The pioneering trading platform OpenSea became the infrastructure, standardizing the product logic of trading platforms, and they reaped the largest dividends from the NFT market.

• Animoca Brands, a company similar to our Blueport Interactive, was originally a mobile game developer that completely shifted to the crypto field after 2017, but their main interest remains blockchain assets related to games. Last April, we discussed how to purchase the IP they held with Yat Siu, but by the second half of the year, I felt the distance between us was even greater than before in the gaming industry.

• A16Z Capital; today, the crypto industry generally praises them, while some sharp criticisms should also be noted.

• Elon Musk and his mother; I find myself increasingly annoyed by him lately.

Since the first half of last year, the DeFi market, composed of DEX, decentralized lending, and various algorithmic stablecoins, began to give way to a colorful and bizarre PFP market. Initially, many found it unbelievable, transitioning from disdain and misunderstanding to being unable to keep up. Thus, during what some called the NFT Summer, OpenSea found a dense new continent in the forest, becoming the biggest market winner. Bored Apes opened their mouths, almost covering half their faces, inhaling the cannabis in their mouths, assisting Yuga Labs in building a dream of a crypto next-generation entertainment empire.

The reason I placed Jack Dorsey and Twitter at the top of the contributor list is that I believe Twitter is the biggest driving force behind the NFT market.

3. The Advance and Ambition of Product Companies

By the fourth quarter of last year, OpenSea held 97% of the Ethereum NFT market, which made many digital asset trading platforms envious and shocked, eager to rush in with hastily produced products to compete. Mainstream cryptocurrency trading platforms such as Binance, Huobi, and FTX entered the market one after another, and even Coinbase made a high-profile entry, but did not achieve the expected results.

There is a significant market misunderstanding here. Many investors believe that resources and traffic are the key capabilities to enter the NFT market; these resources are merely capabilities of the primary market. No matter how good a Launchpad performs, it is only temporary, and can even lead to reputational troubles. If a platform's product cannot effectively support the secondary market, no matter how much traffic and resources are obtained at great cost, it will ultimately become sediment in the open sea of OpenSea.

Compared to giants, new product companies are very active, and we can see many ambitious beginnings from their continuous product innovations. From my observations, these product teams, with a few exceptions that have explored the DeFi field, mostly come from product development accumulations in the Web 2.0 field.

• On the Solana public chain, the market Magic Eden quickly became the leader.

• Trading aggregators, first Geine, then GEM, and later Element catching up.

• Multi-chain supporting trading markets, Tofu, Element, and NFTtrade.

• Token trading reward platforms Looksrare and X2Y2.

• Data dashboards, with Nansen occupying the professional market's top position, followed by NFTGo, NFTtrack, and TwitterScan entering with some new data metrics.

• The wallet market, with Bitkeep NFT Market integrating an NFT aggregation market.

• Vertical platforms for games are also gradually emerging.

But we must also see that a gradually diversified NFT trading market is taking shape, almost resembling the early competitive evolution of various platforms like Huobi, Binance, OKex, Kucoin, etc. We set aside operational capabilities for now; merely in terms of product iteration, trading platforms have evolved as follows.

• Coin-to-coin trading

• Spot trading

• Futures and contracts

• Quantitative and grid trading

• Copy trading systems

• Wealth management and loans

The NFT trading market today focuses on trading, and tomorrow it will expand into lending. Today is a battle of tools and data; what comes next? I believe the composability of the DeFi market will eventually migrate here. I am even more convinced that this market will sooner or later face a complex competitive landscape similar to CEX trading platforms, where technology, market, operations, and capital are all indispensable.

4. Three Active Forces

We will not consider the interference of a bear market; if we observe teams that continue to iterate products in a bear market, this trend is relatively positive. Currently, the most active market players emerging from the overflow of OpenSea market users or new participating users may develop and derive from the following three paths:

• Tool flow for aggregated trading

• Operational flow for trading rewards

• Data flow for tracking on-chain data

Based on my personal intuition, the three emerging forces will capture an increasingly larger market share, and these three product and operation teams will absorb and learn from each other’s strengths in aggregated trading, token-driven governance, and data tracking services. If product and operation iterations continue in this way, the NFT market will gradually grow into a new paradigm, possibly unrecognizable from today’s platform products.

Of course, the above conclusions have a narrow relativity, limited by the current mainstream protocols, which still have significant room for improvement, coupled with the inadequacy of product design in guiding liquidity capabilities. Approaching from a completely new angle and breaking through is also highly possible.

Next, many questions need to be verified and unlocked in the unfolding of market changes. Like the battlefield fog in the strategy game "Heroes of Might and Magic" I played in my youth, without activating new maps, it’s hard to imagine what the next step will actually look like. Perhaps today’s NFT market is merely in the preschool competition stage, with the big test yet to come.

5. The Gradual and Dramatic Changes in Trading Protocols

Let’s focus on the trading protocols in the Ethereum L1 market. "To adapt to change, to remain unchanged is to be on the brink of death." First, from the perspective of decentralized trading protocols, it is full of uncertainties. The semi-centralized issue that has long been criticized by Web3 purists hangs over OpenSea like the sword of Damocles.

For example, whether it’s the recently migrated Seaport protocol or the previous Wyvern, OpenSea’s orders are implemented through an Offchain mechanism. Can we achieve fully OnChain orders on Ethereum L2, like the current Magic Eden on Solana, which is entirely based on on-chain order matching? That would make asset trading aggregation more efficient and better realize composability similar to DeFi.

Let’s review how several decentralized trading protocols have evolved historically.

• OpenSea’s Wyvern was used until the end of May this year, making it the longest-serving NFT protocol layer retiree. It’s important to note that the iteration of protocols in the decentralized crypto market is not like operating system and application upgrades; they are either abandoned or used in parallel.

• OpenSea’s recently migrated Seaport protocol significantly reduces gas fees and is currently the most dominant protocol in the entire crypto market, with the gas burned already exceeding that of the Uniswap protocol. OpenSea is migrating most of its business to this protocol.

• Looksrare uses its own protocol.

• The 0x protocol released V4 in March this year, which was directly deployed by Coinbase, but unfortunately, the Coinbase NFT market performed poorly.

• ElementEx, which further reduces gas compared to Seaport, recently passed a Certik audit. The protocol has expanded its application toolkit and has opened its API.

Next, there are already some NFT fragmentation and lending protocols on the market, currently in the evaluation stage by professional investors, but they have not sparked a positive response from the general market.

The above are slow and dull changes; larger transformations may come from the following speculations.

Better support for trading and financial derivatives, and more robust protocols may emerge. Whether the composability effect between NFTs and DeFi occurs still requires a new bull market.

Currently, the ecosystem on Ethereum L2 has not yet taken off, but what about the next step?

Let’s not forget that protocols are the heart and operating system of decentralized applications; they are AMD and Intel, the Apple iOS, Google Android, and Huawei Harmony in our phones. Protocol iteration is not a simple upgrade, like adding a patch in Web2 applications; we are waiting for various trading platforms to release V2, V3, and V4.

6. Why Aggregators?

Today, it is not a few heavyweight cryptocurrency trading platforms that are changing the status quo of the NFT market, nor is it Rarible, which launched the token mechanism early on; their product design has walked into a dead end from the start (many entrepreneurial teams that followed their product design last year have fallen silent), nor is it the art market SuperRare and Foundation, although they still have considerable potential, but their target market is relatively niche.

What truly began to shake the OpenSea market is the teams that implement aggregators through tools and boldly adopt token incentive mechanisms, such as aggregators like GEM and trading reward mechanisms similar to Looksrare.

Here, let’s first discuss why NFT aggregators? Firstly, we can also see the inevitability of mainstream NFT trading platforms completely opening their trading APIs. Many believe that aggregators have taken market share from OpenSea; in fact, the relationship between aggregators and trading platforms should be mutually beneficial.

The market evolves forward; looking back suddenly, the once beautiful northern lady has become unrecognizable, and it is unbearable to look back. Twenty years ago, when the internet started, the decline of Yahoo and the miracle of Google caught us off guard. Twenty years later, in the blockchain era aimed at financial revolution, how we view the relationship between Uniswap, Sushiswap, and 1Inch on the DeFi stage seems somewhat reminiscent.

However, comparing DEX and NFT trading markets, there are significant differences in their decentralized nature. Uniswap is a completely decentralized pure protocol trading platform; as for OpenSea, although the trading protocol itself is a smart contract on-chain, the vast majority of business processes are integrated OffChain, relying on off-chain operations as a platform for order processing efficiency. Because of this, many industry insiders believe OpenSea has a high barrier to entry.

In fact, when more trading platforms begin to rise, NFT market aggregators will have a more significant efficiency advantage. For example, with the adoption of trading incentive mechanisms by Looksrare and X2Y2, each has captured some market share, tearing open a gap in the market. Although their performance in handling orders across the entire chain is not perfect, it has provided sufficient rationale for the existence of NFT trading platforms like GEM and Genie. Imagine if more NFT trading platforms did not participate; GEM could only innovate tools and user experiences for OpenSea.

Speaking of tools, let’s review how GEMs first focused on aggregation and then gradually encroached on the OpenSea market using the capabilities of many excellent product managers from Web 2.0 through leading product design.

• Batch purchase cart

• Batch listing

• Cross-market listing

• Collection offer

• Sweep

• Entering the primary market with embedded mintlist

• To make the product user-friendly, there are still many things to do. The revolution has not yet succeeded; developers still need to work hard.

To be honest, if we look at the benchmark management and rapid iteration ideas promoted by major internet companies over the years, OpenSea will eventually be able to fully realize this on its platform. Although I believe this approach may not align with OpenSea's product philosophy or values, it cannot be denied that their product upgrade speed is too slow. However, their acquisition of GEM today can be seen as a clever and dignified explanation.

7. Not Opening APIs is a Step Backward

There were once attempts to enter the market through social means or to occupy the upstream with resources, but for traders, the product's liquidity capability is far from solving their immediate needs.

Aggregation has become an important gene for the next NFT market; it is no longer an independent product concept. During the Microsoft dominance era, a commonly used keyword was integration, which was later criticized as evidence of monopolists bullying the small. For example, in 1998, Microsoft integrated a web browser directly into the Win98 operating system, which caused Netscape to lose its initial leadership in the internet market. In the Google and Facebook era, the focus shifted to information aggregation, and the keyword became aggregation.

In the Web 3.0 era, the composability often mentioned in the DeFi era resonates strongly with today’s asset and order aggregation. To fully share the market growth dividends of aggregation, we must propose Open APIs.

Open APIs face an A/B choice—opportunity and challenge. Third parties can call your order data and use it freely to enhance platform efficiency, but those who do not open will be isolated and will eventually become distant islands. Unlike centralized crypto asset trading platforms, any NFT trading platform must proactively open APIs. From a political science perspective, in the Web 3.0 era of great navigation, those who do not open APIs are practicing the mountain-topism of Web 2.0. In terms of game theory in economics, facing the prisoner's dilemma, based on the premise of "rational economic man," the choice that benefits both prisoners is to confess. Opening APIs and sharing liquidity across the entire ecosystem, while all parties maintain rationality, is the only way to escape the prisoner's dilemma and achieve Nash equilibrium.

During the peak of Web 2.0, WeChat adopted an open platform strategy, and Alipay and PayPal also opened payments based on this consideration. It is precisely because more NFT trading platforms have entered that aggregators can become a natural price comparison system, providing traders with cross-market order books and the best Floor Price opportunities in all markets. Therefore, in a certain sense, the entry of Looksrare, X2Y2, and more resource platforms is mutually beneficial with GEM.

8. Designing Trading Rewards and DAO Community Governance Models

Similarly, NFT trading markets that have adopted tokenization in their operations have proven they can exist and gain sustainable development opportunities. Let’s compare two interesting cases in operational design:

• Looksrare opened the market from overseas communities, packaging and emphasizing brand from the top down, with market actions resembling a vampire attack. We must admire their team’s courage and means. They first rushed to do trading mining at the tail end of the bull market, which was once criticized for self-brushing with a few large assets, and later began to emphasize listing rewards for blue-chip NFTs. Their approach has always been very clever.

• X2Y2 started from domestic communities, bottom-up, gradually catching up. They first implemented listing rewards, but initially did not directly promote transactions. After several operational adjustments, you can see that the operational adjustment process of X2Y2 has not been easy. I noticed that today X2Y2 has also placed more direct trading rewards in the first position.

• It is evident that they are learning from each other in competition.

From an observer's perspective, I find their attempts in user growth and retention under the logic of token governance are reflections of each other, critiquing and absorbing one another, which also provides valuable experience for the next market entrants. This reminds me of the complexity of operating platform tokens, which is even greater, to the point where I realize I had no prior experience.

Many questions cannot be avoided, such as:

• Who to reward? Traders/order providers/referrers/sharers

• Rewarding traders? Then you might have no one actively listing.

• How to design rewards for listings? Be careful of many free riders.

• Rewards for referrers and sharers.

• Should there be a community-governed DAO reward fund, open to creators, artists, GameFi, and other potential collaborators?

The above reminds me of my memories from the era of game production. The more painful problem than handling large-scale concurrent events and server stability is how to do a good job in system planning and numerical planning while leaving operational teams with Lua language operational event planning scripts, which requires significant effort in economic modeling and operational capabilities.

9. Aggregators Do Not Equal Aggregated Trading Markets

With more platforms emerging, aggregation is in line with the trend. The aggregation model will even appear in various paths of the NFT market. No one can underestimate the market value of a tool with strong aggregation trading flow capabilities.

In June, OpenSea acquired GEM.

In July, Uniswap acquired Genie.

Both NFT and DeFi leaders have taken action to acquire aggregators. Their next intentions are not hard to guess.

However, the models of GEM and Genie also have painful issues. In fact, they do not count as standard NFT trading platforms; they do not provide their own trading protocols. As pure trading aggregators, all their orders come from aggregated third-party orders. To put it metaphorically, the business logic in their contracts is equivalent to adding a composite function called a shopping cart on top of the trading original function.

Moreover, they must adhere to the trading commission ratios set by different trading markets and do not provide premiums to please users. For example, OpenSea charges 2.5%, Looksrare is 2%, and X2Y2 currently offers 0.5%. GEM finds it challenging to provide premiums for matching trades as explicit revenue. Their net revenue and rankings on Dappradar do not correlate because they do not have trading fees as revenue, and their business model may be questioned.

10. Element 2.0's Three-Stage Rocket

In July last year, Sequoia Capital, SIG, and Dragonfly Capital invested in Element. In September, Element released its first version, which did not generate much response until we recently saw Element 2.0.

The previous product either involved issuing tokens or deciding whether to create its own trading protocol or focus solely on aggregation. Element 2.0 did not take this approach; instead, it adopted a three-layer structure similar to a three-stage rocket.

This three-layer structure, although based on a hybrid technology stack and tools from Web3 and Web2, is a commercial three-layer design, and we hope not to approach it with a physics mindset.

• The first layer uses a well-written aggregator for cross-market buying and selling, addressing the basic capability of product service liquidity. This first layer is crucial; I see many NFT teams entering the market, first seeking assets and issuing them, but users do not stay. If secondary market liquidity is not resolved well, the primary market is in vain.

• The second layer uses incentives for tasks like trading, listing, and sharing to support the creator ecosystem, combining community referral rewards to solve user activity and sense of belonging.

• The third layer provides price discounts for professional users with a more robust trading protocol, combined with better utility achieved based on the protocol layer to enhance the trading experience. With the third layer, order, offer, and other business data and processing tools are fully opened to partners through APIs and SDKs, further participating in the shared liquidity market cycle.

This design organizes the deep coupling of the three technology stacks of aggregators, trading incentives, and tool data, establishing a new architecture similar to DeFi mechanisms driven by Web3 products. The intent at the product level is very clear: to provide a one-stop solution for NFT asset liquidity and platform user traffic issues. This product design path is different from OpenSea, different from Looksrare, and also different from the pure aggregator model of GEM.

More accurately, the aggregated market does not equal the aggregator; the aggregator should be tool-oriented, only for developers, but the market platform must provide a Launchpad, must have a trading protocol that supports business, and also needs an operational team that closely collaborates with the community and products.

11. Speculations on New Round of Challengers

Next, I am more concerned about two markets and one entry point: one is the next-generation comprehensive market, based on data and driven by algorithms. The other is a vertical gaming market, focusing on segmented trading scenarios. Specifically, the entry point refers to wallets.

• Is there a market driven by precise algorithm matching similar to TikTok's content distribution? More accurately, since the NFT market is not a centralized financial scenario but a gradually decentralized e-commerce-like market.

• Will there be a completely decentralized NFT market driven by precise algorithm matching?

• Will mobile decentralized wallets become the entry point for the NFT market? If this proposition holds, then what are Imtoken and TokenPocket waiting for?

• Additionally, will mobile crypto asset management platforms and media platforms have greater enthusiasm to participate?

• Will existing major trading platforms come back to compete?

12. The Progress and Loss of Public Chain Ecology

It can be said that Ethereum's strong consensus foundation is the value anchor of today’s NFT market. As for so-called digital collectibles, I’d rather not say much.

NFTs should not be exclusive to the Ethereum market. No public chain neglects the NFT ecology. However, the desolation outside of Ethereum has surprised me. Currently, the biggest winner in the market is Solana, whose ecology allows the Magic Eden trading platform and many NFT creation teams to thrive. NFTs have given Solana public chain a greater voice, and on this stage, future Metaverse and Web3 projects are promising.

• In contrast to Solana's performance, the major Ethereum virtual machine ecosystems like Polygon, BSC, and Avalanche have made significant progress gaps. Although they have all made bold statements, this is somewhat unexpected.

• The NFT market and GameFi on BNBChain have great imaginative space; theoretically, Binance has a very good GameFi resource base. However, compared to the potential of Binance CEX and DeFi ecosystems back in the day, it still falls far short of most people's market expectations. Although many users and project parties are involved, the trading volume of star assets has not yet risen significantly. The only issue with the Binance ecosystem today is not that it is too large, with high barriers, but that it is too involved in too many direct undertakings.

• Polygon. I believe they missed the best opportunity to exert effort in the first half of last year when their token price was surging; they were too conservative. In the DeFi era, they rose by telling ecological stories. Their opportunity, or the next big story, may rely on the ZK Rollup zero-knowledge proof technology team they acquired.

• Filecoin. NFTs need decentralized storage providers for media files, such as IPFS, Filecoin, and AR. After all, the Image element in NFT metadata must be written into the code with a decentralized storage address. In the future, various formats of Image files will become larger, but it seems Filecoin has not effectively utilized this grand narrative. The largest storage public chain's circulating market value astonishingly evaporated by 95% last month.

• NEAR Protocol. I once had a roast duck meal with their co-founder Illia Polosukhin. We called him Yilong. At that time, he had just raised a lot of money from major funds and was ambitious, but NEAR's supported Mintbase started early, and we have yet to see more progress.

• Justin Sun also got involved with NFTs early on, investing heavily in art NFTs. What I admire most about Justin is his ability to stir things up. We drank until 3 AM in Singapore. He wants to create an NFT fund and support Tron’s NFT trading platform, but how will the Tron public chain ecology drive NFT creators to join?

• Polkadot. In the autumn of the year before last, I had the privilege of chatting face-to-face with Gavin Wood for nearly a whole morning in a restaurant near Tsinghua University Wudaokou. He is actually the earliest proponent of the Web3 concept, and we had a dialogue about the trends surrounding the Web3 technology stack. He is an entrepreneur who talks about technology with the joy of a child among the big shots in the crypto circle and is also an active blockchain evangelist. He is optimistic about NFTs. However, two years later, has Polkadot not highlighted any discourse power that matches its industry status in the NFT market?

• Flow public chain, the originator of CryptoKitties and the creator of the ERC721 protocol, has been silent since entering the peak with NBA TopShot. However, I still hope GameFi is their opportunity.

13. The Power of Community

The atmosphere at the NFT.NYC conference in New York in June was much better than I had imagined. Despite the ongoing bear market in cryptocurrencies, it did not diminish the enthusiasm for NFT curation and party activities at all. The emotions here not only diluted the anxiety of impending bad news but also temporarily made us forget that Bitcoin has dropped 70% from its historical peak, and the complete collapse of LUNA and Three Arrows Capital has caused painful damage to market consensus. In contrast, the Consensus conference in Austin in May, which has been the top blockchain summit operated by CoinDesk for many years, felt somewhat cold.

Today, the NFT community is beginning to move from online to offline. More and more NFT gatherings are happening; I have a Punk, you have an Ape, and they are core members of the Azuki community, quickly becoming new identities to engage in discussions and build connections, and it’s easier to participate in this identity. NFTs have become crypto business cards; being a well-known NFT holder in the Web3 world is akin to the status of guild elders in the early days of online gaming, like in the legendary 1st district 1 server or the US server of World of Warcraft. Yes, today’s NFT Whales and NFT KOLs on social platforms have a status that attracts NFT communities and platforms to compete for their attention.

The cultural attributes of NFTs are very important. Community activity, member cohesion, and brand influence are necessary conditions for a project’s success. I also noticed that more and more people in China are organizing Mfer gatherings, and I can guess that many new NFT projects are emerging from this community. Many hope its price will break 10 ETH, but the price of Mfer has not risen, fluctuating between 1 to 4 ETH. However, it has provided more opportunities for participation.

14. Asian Faces Opening Their Eyes

NFTs have financial attributes, but there are certainly cultural differences and regional preferences. Many investors’ judgments about these differences were almost disproven last year. This year, this phenomenon has been broken. NFTs are no longer dominated by American culture. Asian stars, anime, and many IPs are gradually joining in.

• Japanese modern artist Takashi Murakami's Sunflowers

• The first Chinese meme series, the Cold Rabbit series

• Jay Chou's PhantaBear series

• Edison Chen's Nvlpe series

• Yu Wenle's Zoobie series

• Theirsverse led by Yi Nengjing.

I have met Yi Nengjing two or three times in Silicon Valley; she plans to integrate the NFT brand with offline beauty products. I am amazed by her hands-on efforts, which have inspired many to participate. I believe that once the market returns to a bull phase, their holders will smile.

This situation is just beginning. Asian faces are increasingly appearing on the NFT stage. I predict that within the next year, seven to eight of the top ten global NFT trading markets will be occupied by Chinese overseas teams or Asian companies.

15. Moving Towards a Mature Trader Group

Last year, when introducing NFTs to people, I had to struggle to explain the tedious term "non-fungible," such as how ERC721 differs from ERC20, and how metadata is stored in JSON files, with substantial differences between on-chain and off-chain. Now, no one cares. After the internet became widespread, no one asked what HTTP and URL were anymore. When many people participate in something, the cognitive threshold disappears, like breaking a window paper with a rub.

Finding the feeling is not difficult; the simplest way is to track the floor price of a blue-chip NFT with an appropriate psychological price expectation, similar to observing the price fluctuation trends of BTC and ETH, starting from practical purchases and listings.

You need to communicate with active players, enter their communities, and participate in their offline gatherings. Today's active NFT players are very skilled at using a plethora of tools. They will tell you:

• Freemint is very popular.

• How to save on gas fees.

• Where to list for fast sales.

• What tools to use for one-click sweeping.

• How to identify rarity in a collection.

• How to track whale addresses.

• Which Twitter accounts to follow.

• Which YouTubers to subscribe to.

• Which NFT websites with certain features might be phishing scams.

These questions are no longer something OpenSea can handle alone. Is the market mature? My answer is no. However, users are becoming increasingly mature. If you cannot answer at least five of the above questions, you may not have even entered the door yet.

And don’t get too addicted.