Conclusion & Take Away

• Among the artwork, brand, platform and tools category, the brand currently has the largest share, but the lack of quality projects is a good opportunity for founders with brand/product backgrounds.

• Platform: now the trading platform is more in the grab existing users, future-oriented thinking, all the trading platform monthly active users(MAU) only one million, a large number of users and use cases are still outside, new platforms still have opportunities

• Tools: three lows(low development costs, low threshold for users to use, and low upside). But if there is a way to form a network effect through other means, there is a chance to build a platform or community of great value

  • The golden rule of web2 products is "come for the tools, stay for the network"

  • JustApedIn starts with NFT content tools and then introduces user interactions that have the opportunity to build into a more valuable NFT community

• Artwork: The perfect use case for NFT. But its upside is not high since a limited number of people are interested in it, which needs time to settle and cultivate

NFT Classification

NFT has entered a deep bear market and the big blue chips have shrunk a lot, making me review the hottest PFP category (actually PFPs is some kind of brand in essential) that may not offer enough value to support them. I divided the NFT project into 2 types: Application and Infrastructure. Applications are divided into 8 categories.

• Artwork: Artblock / Beeple / CryptoPunks / ......

• Brand: BAYC / Doodles / Mfers / ......

• Platforms: OpenSea / X2Y2 / Outland / ......

• Tools: Premint / Coniun / Gem / Nansen / NFTgo / ......

• Socials: Twitter / Discord / Instagram

• Games: Axie Infinity / StepN / Otherside / ......

• Music: sound.xyz

• Domain: ENS / Unstoppable ......

For your attention, this classification is based on the principle of "differentiation of value for different categories", and does not fully comply with the MECE principle. While NFT projects themselves are dynamic, the same project may fall into multiple tracks at different times. For example, the famous CryptoPunks, which started as "crypto art” in a small group, became a powerful brand with the explosion of PFP last year and leapt to become the spokesperson of all NFT projects.

Since games, music, and domain are with very professional knowledge, socials are all still web2 products at the moment and are not in the scope of our analysis today. Here I will do an analysis of the 4 main categories, including artwork, brands, platforms, and tools. In the end, I will introduce a project named JustApedIn that I believe with great potential.

Artwork

I have to say that the 3 great innovations in the history of web3 in turn, blockchain, smart contracts and the ERC-721 protocol, make artwork the perfect use case for the initial phase of NFT.

I have summarized 4 pain points for artwork trading.

• Difficult to identify the authenticity: only the top artwork has a certification body (but can also be faked), what about a large number of medium and long tail artworks?

• Don't know where to buy: galleries? Auction houses? The traditional trading market is scattered, and there is no way to know when and where to see the one you like

• No Reasonable pricing: why this price tag? Besides the auctions using market mechanisms, it is hard to tell why the other artwork is worth so much (e.g., $88888 in a gallery)? No one can explain it clearly

• There is a huge gap between the artist's income and the value of the artwork: the most typical example is Van Gogh, whose paintings were unappreciated during his lifetime, and the value skyrocketed after his birth but did not feed back to the creator and his family. I guess this is also the reason why many unknown artworks are priced at an inflated level. The creator would lose benefit if the price is set low and if the artworks became hot in the secondary market after a while, the money made by traders and the trading market would have nothing to do with the original creator.

The blockchain brings the confirmation and anti-counterfeiting, the smart contract brings the tradability, and ERC-721 makes everything tradable. 3 of these abilities add together, making the artwork NFT perfectly solves the above 4 pain points.

• Anti-counterfeiting: Transparent information on the chain, it is clear whether it is the original author's work

• Where to buy: NFT primary market, secondary market (trading platform)

• Pricing: Historical data on the chain can be referred to, and even machine learning can be used to fit the price

• Artist revenue: OpenSea innovatively introduces the concept of royalties, and every time an artwork is sold, the original author will be given a share according to a fixed percentage, solving the problem of no revenue for the creator after the subsequent price surge. At the same time, this mechanism will also encourage creators to sell their works at a lower price in order to get more attention (royalties have been very controversial recently, so I'll write a separate article on that).

Of course, the perfect solution to the pain point does not mean that this category can flourish without a hitch. The upside of the artworks is not high since a limited number of people are interested in them, and it is not a mass market in itself

From the consumer perspective: the number of people who can appreciate the value of art and are willing to buy it is limited, and for "digital art", the number is even smaller.

From the investment & supply perspective: the precipitation of artwork needs time, the existing evaluation methods are more for physical ones, digital artwork needs a longer time to cultivate and mature.

品牌

Branding

The essence of a brand is the carrier of the differentiated value of goods, including 2 aspects

• Sellers: a brand is a mindset, providing decision value and reducing user transaction costs (search, comparison, testing)

• Buyers: a brand is an identity, providing social value, and can further rising to community value

Do you see a familiar scenario? Yes, basically the PFP / Club projects we see on the market are essentially building a brand, providing identity and social value for users with the support of social networks; at the same time, the stronger the brand power, the more prominent the user's mind is, the more willing to know and buy. OpenSea 30-day trading volume chart, the top 10, except Otherside is a game, Art Blocks is artwork, the other 8 are PFP projects, building their own brands.

Why would a large number of celebrities be willing to pay 1m dollars for a small picture? This is the differentiated value given by the brand. To make an image analogy, punk / bayc are luxury goods, similar to Chanel, lv, which give people a great social value.

Of course, the brand can not only have differentiated value, but also has its own basic value (utility value). Besides giving people a social identity, Luxury bags with real high-quality designs and materials. Cell phones have to be able to make phone calls and take pictures, surf online before they can be differentiated from Apple / Huawei / Xiaomi. If one day the iPhone signal is not good enough to make calls and access the Internet, I believe the entire brand value will be extremely shrunk.

Now the biggest problem with these NFT projects is that, besides social value, there is almost no utility value (airdrop can only be considered bonus & donuts), as a result, a lot of blue-chip floor prices are cut in half after FOMO. So the next step for these projects must be to create their own unique utility, including online and offline, in fact, many are already doing it, just overshadowed by the social value before.

• Online

  • Become the key to the metaverse: BAYC can enter Otherside to socialize and play; Meebits can enter all metaverse natively

  • Become a movie character: several BAYC-related movies/animations are on the way

  • ......

• Offline

  • Stores with licensed IP: BAYC burger stores

  • Co-branding: Deadfellaz and Gilson collaborate on snowboard

  • ......

The brand itself has a large number of methodologies that have been tested over time, and there are plenty of brand companies in the Fortune 500 to learn from (P&G, Unilever, Nike, Coca-Cola ......). I will also keep an eye on the brand building of these NFT projects (I own some)

Also, CC0, which I talked about before, is a special way to build a brand for NFT, see this article if you are interested.

Now the whole NFT market is lacking in quality supply but ppl want own Apple and Tesla, this is a good opportunity for founders with brand/product backgrounds.

Platform

When there are SKUs and transactions, platforms would appear naturally. The essence of the platform is the matching between buyers and sellers, OpenSea is a trading platform(marketplace), and Outland can also be a distribution platform in the future (matching a series of artists/artworks and buyers, although there are still few artists).

Platforms have great value due to their network effect, and basically, half of the top web2 companies are platforms (Amazon / Google / Alibaba / ......).

Like brands, platforms themselves have a large number of methodologies that have been tested over time. In abstract, there are 3 major parts of the marketplace: supply side, mechanism side, and user side, and each of players are making innovations in these 3 parts to enhance user experience.

• User side: X2Y2 makes the shopping cart and batch uploading, and Element makes the aggregator ......

  • User incentive is not the core competitiveness, because the tier1 platform can always use more incentives to crush the competitors

• Mechanism side: OpenSea made seaport to optimize gas fees and hope to turn it into infrastructure, sudoswap made AMM to enhance liquidity, and Looksrare made hybrid payment ......

• Supply side: Magic Eden and OpenSea make Lauchpad, Magic Eden makes industry investment, Element adds real-time royalty ......

Compared to brands, the Mathew effect of platforms is very obvious, you can refer to the current situation of e-commerce and social platform, the top 3 basically occupy more than 99% of the volume. In a word, the upside is very high, the entry point is very difficult, and needs the right timing.

But on the other hand, all the marketplaces together only have a million monthly active users(MAU), and the whole industry is still in the initial niche market. Now the marketplace is more in grabbing the existing users. Future-oriented thinking, a large number of users and use cases are still outside, new platforms still have opportunities. PDD is a typical example. In 2016, when everyone thought the e-commerce war was ending in China, the founding team dug up a huge gold mine from the underserved low-tier market.

We should ask ourselves this question.

What will the future look like when NFT reaches 100 million monthly active users? What new use cases will emerge, and how to start preparing now?

At the same time, I have always had a point of view, NFT marketplace and e-commerce marketplace are very similar, reference to the current complex and diverse ecology of e-commerce, in retrospect look at these NFT marketplaces, there would be abundant features and competitions in next 10 years.

The "future opportunities of trading platforms" itself is also a very worthy topic of discussion, here first not to expand, I plan to write an independent article to discuss it.

Tools

Tools are always the water sellers for gold seekers, and where there is a gold mine, there will be tool vendors. So it's not hard to understand why there are so many (homogenized) tools, including

• Price comparison: Gem / Genie

• Data tracking & analysis: Nansen / Coniun / NFTgo / NFTtrack / NFTScore, this sub-track has the most competitors

• Whitelist Raffle: Premint

• ......

Frankly speaking, the development cost of tools is relatively low and the user demand is very obvious, which is why many NFT entrepreneurs choose to do tools at first. But the added value of the tool itself is not high, in the business model is with slightly low upside.

But! One of the golden rules of web2 products is "come for the tools, stay for the network". Yes, Instagram is a typical example, evolving from a photography tool to a multi-billion dollar social network.

JustApedIn, which is introduced below, has considerable potential to evolve from a tool to an NFT native community.

JustApedIn

JustApedIn is incubated by Coniun, and it is simply a one-stop content tool for browsing NFT News, including user-hold NFT and top NFT.

The current content about NFT is basically in twitter and discord, what are the user pain points?

• There is too much shilling content on the platform: Twitter is full of content about giveaways and corresponding retweets, which I don't want to see.

• Most of the content on the platform has nothing to do with me: twitter has a lot of content that has nothing to do with my NFT holdings, and I don't want to see it. I prefer to interact and communicate with the same project holders

• It's hard for all the holders to know each other: unless they are retweeted by the KOLs or the project's official account

• discord is organized by project, but it's troublesome to check: currently each project will have a dc channel to send notifications, it's troublesome to check one by one, it would be nice if there was a place to check them all.

How JustApedIn solve these pain points？

Re-structure for twitter & discord

The essence of the problem is that neither twitter nor discord is based on NFT project structure, and there is no classification of information. So JustApeIn solves these pain points by 2 things

1. cluster the news and remove giveaways and shillings

2. structure the news into 3 dimensions, independent NFT, latest, Triggered the Most Sales

So, in the My Holdings Only tab, I can see only the information related to holding NFT (cleared of marketing messages) and also know which fams have just joined, and it is easy to tweet a welcome and follow each other.

There will be more interesting things in the future

1. "Triggered 3 sales within an hour” feature is very useful to buyers and projects. Buyer can know why ppl ape in and projects can recognize who and what help them to spread the world

2. Later ppl may find that they can interact with news directly, and even publish news here and make friends. They would be rewarded with $JAI and other prizes from NFT projects. This tool upgrades to a structured community for NFT or web3

3. Based on users driving the spread of projects and helping JustApedIn to add content, it is possible to measure the value of users in the NFT world. It's easier for projects to find target users, and the platform can design Tokenomics to motivate users to contribute continuously. Does that sound interesting?

To summarize, JustApedIn is a refactoring of twitter and discord

• It's easier for users to find news and fams based on NFT projects, instead of joining dc one by one and struggling to find them on twitter

• It's easier for the project and community to find and reward high-value users

• Once JustApedIn is upgraded from an NFT tool to an NFT community, there can be more powerful business models such as advertising

That's would be a successful evolution according to the web2 golden rule "come for the tools, stay for the network".

The first step is to become a useful content subscription tool, then introduce user interaction and build a more valuable network step by step. There is currently no native web3 community, and JustApedIn could be the first to fill the gap (and possibly into a big problem, depending on the team's operational capabilities).

Next big thing? Probably Nothing.

Will this really be the case? No one knows, so let's wait and see.

Community vs Social Network

Finally, I'd like to extend it a bit. Today many of my friends asked me about the difference between justapedin and other social network platforms, like @farcaster_xyz @context As you can see from the screenshot below, justapedin is aggregated by project, which is essentially a community, more like Reddit; the other products are aggregated by relationship, which is essentially social, more like Facebook / Twitter. Community is more topic-based, while social is more relationship-based, solving different problems and designing different philosophies.

In my personal opinion, because communities are based on topics, new content can give birth to new communities; but social is based on relationships, without the change of relationships, basically, no new social platform can be created. This is also why Facebook and Tencent have been standing for so many years.

P.S. This product is still in beta, if you are interested in it, please like+retweet this tweet below and tweet me your ETH wallet address

https://twitter.com/starzqeth/status/1560614225134768131

End

Welcome to own my NFT and buy me a cup of coffee lol. btw, I made this cup of coffee and latte art by myself : )

Also welcome to have more discussions with me twitter @starzqeth

edition://0x7e4401D18327A93c29ee18a3C13f8adA3bA2245f?editionId=0

Reference

https://justaped.in/