{"id":12567,"date":"2023-11-14T11:45:35","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T11:45:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nft.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/14\/nfts-were-meant-to-change-everything-what-happened\/"},"modified":"2023-11-14T11:45:35","modified_gmt":"2023-11-14T11:45:35","slug":"nfts-were-meant-to-change-everything-what-happened","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nft.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/14\/nfts-were-meant-to-change-everything-what-happened\/","title":{"rendered":"NFTs were meant to change everything \u2013 what happened?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A funny thing happened in Hong Kong earlier this month. Well, funny unless you were there.<\/p>\n

The annual ApeFest, where collectors of Bored Ape NFTs<\/a> (remember them?) took place in Hong Kong (for the uninitiated, NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, can be linked to products like digital artworks and traded for cryptocurrencies on the open market). Nouveau-riche investors who got rich off the back of the revolutionary technology and investment products came together to party. Hard.<\/p>\n

Too hard, in fact. A number of them reported suffering<\/a> from \u201ceye burn, extreme pain and impaired vision after attending one of its events, which was lit by UV lights\u201d.<\/p>\n

Humans should never wish harm on others, but the internet \u2013 ever a lover of irony \u2013 found the whole thing hilarious. A poorly organised event, which cut corners on key elements like how to light parties, had resulted in real-life harm to those who attended.<\/p>\n

Many people don\u2019t like NFTs and those associated with them, in part because the market, which exploded in interest as landmark sales like the $69bn auction of one single NFT<\/a> in 2021, grew so quickly that the plausible, intriguing ideas underpinning it \u2013 democratising access to investing and allowing people to make money outside traditional finance is good \u2013 were sullied by get-rich-quick schemes. (I made a decent living in 2021 exposing them, from the \u201cfemale-run\u201d project actually run by men<\/a> to the influencer selling NFTs of her farts<\/a>, who told an entirely different story of its genesis to her business partner, which was a different story to the one her PR agency told. Yes, life covering the NFT industry was strange.)<\/p>\n

Others don\u2019t like it because they may have invested in the market at its peak, and quickly got stung. Whichever it was, NFTs had their moment \u2026 and now it\u2019s over.<\/p>\n

Pride comes before a fall<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/svg><\/span>Visitors are pictured in front of an immersive art installation by media artist Refik Anadol, which was converted into NFTs.<\/span> Photograph: Tyrone Siu\/Reuters<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A scan of Google Trends data<\/a> for \u201cNFT\u201d is instructive to understand quite how quickly the concept gripped the world \u2013 and just how rapidly we shrugged off our interest. A huge peak in search interest spiked in January 2022, before dropping off the metaphorical cliff over the rest of the year. Search interest has been bumbling along at a slowly decreasing level since the start of 2023, with only a small uptick in people searching for the term in the last week \u2013 presumably to figure out what the hell went on in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

That search trends data tells its own story. But the cautionary tale of the Hong Kong Bored Ape meetup also feels like an allegory for the whole NFT movement. And it\u2019s possible too to track the degradation of the whole sector through Bored Apes, which account for around one in every five dollars<\/a> in market capitalisation in the NFT market. In early 2022, you couldn\u2019t spend much less than half a million dollars if you wanted to get your hands on a Bored Ape. Today, they\u2019re selling for a tenth of that price.<\/p>\n

Even Bored Apes, however, have remained relatively insulated from the wider malaise that has hit the NFT market. One analysis<\/a> by an organisation monitoring the traded NFT market suggests that 95% of all NFTs are now practically worthless. They called their analysis \u201cDead NFTs\u201d.<\/p>\n

Blinded by optimism<\/strong><\/p>\n

True believers, of course, will tell you that\u2019s not true. Enough of them still believe in the promise of NFTs to overhaul the world of finance, investment and collectibles that they decided to fly to Hong Kong to demonstrate their connection to the NFT community. But look what that got them.<\/p>\n

In many ways, the Hong Kong debacle tells the story of the NFT sector in microcosm. The founding principle behind NFTs and the blockchain was that it presented a new way of doing things, shorn of the bureaucracy that stymied innovators from succeeding in the traditional way of the world. Except that \u2013 as those who are rubbing their eyes after attending ApeFest are soon realising \u2013 there are reasons those checks and balances are put in place.<\/p>\n

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