HOW NFT CREATES VALUE (2)

It’s not uncommon to see creators organize in-person meetups for their NFT holders, as many did at the recent NFT NYCconference. In other cases, having a specific NFT in your online wallet might be necessary in order to gain access to an online game, chat room, or merchandise store. And creator teams sometimes grant additional tokens to their NFT holders in ways that expand the product ecosystem: owners of a particular goat NFT, for example, were recently able to claim a free baby goat NFT that gives benefits beyond the original token; holders of a particular bear NFT, meanwhile, just received honey.

Thus owning an NFT effectively makes you an investor, a member of a club, a brand shareholder, and a participant in a loyalty program all at once. At the same time, NFTs’ programmability supports new business and profit models — for example, NFTs have enabled a new type of royalty contract, whereby each time a work is resold, a share of the transaction goes back to the original creator.

This all means that NFT-based markets can emerge and gain traction quickly, especially relative to other crypto products. This is both because the NFTs themselves have standalone value — you might buy an art NFT simply because you like it — and because NFTs just need to establish value among a community of potential owners (which can be relatively small), whereas cryptocurrencies need wide acceptance in order to become useful as a store of value and/or medium of exchange.

The Advent of NFT Ecosystems

As marketplaces have sprung up around NFTs, creators have taken advantage of their possibilities in different ways.

The best-known examples are the digital art market, described above, and digital collectables platforms, such as Dapper Labs’s NBA Top Shot, which enables users to collect and exchange NFTs of exciting plays from basketball games — videos called “moments,” which are effectively digital trading cards. Top Shot has been building in gamified challenges and other reasons to own the cards beyond just their pure collectible value, even teasing that moment holders may eventually receive real-world benefits from the NBA.

But what’s emerged more recently is a model of active ecosystem-building around NFT-native properties — leading to novel organizations developed entirely within the NFT space. These products start with an NFT series, but project forward a roadmap under which holders of the NFT gain access to an expanding array of products, activities, and experiences. Revenue from initial and subsequent NFT sales is fed back into the brand, supporting increasingly ambitious projects — which in turn drive up the value of the NFTs themselves.

The Bored Ape Yacht Club, for example, comprises a series of NFT ape images conferring membership in an online community. The project started with a series of private chat rooms and a graffiti board, and has grown to include high-end merchandise, social events, and even an actual yacht party. SupDucks and the Gutter Cat Gang similarly began building communities around NFT image series and associated online spaces; the former has bridged into a boardwalk-themed metaverse game, and the latter has focused on real-world benefits like extravagant in-person events.