Despite crypto crash, NFT enthusiasts keep the party going

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The cryp­to mar­ket has crashed. Dig­i­tal art trad­ing is down. But for the world’s biggest gath­er­ing of NFT enthu­si­asts, the par­ty rages on hard­er than ever.

More than 15,000 peo­ple are expect­ed to gath­er in Times Square this week for NFT.NYC, a con­fer­ence devot­ed to non-fun­gi­ble tokens, or NFTs, a tech­nol­o­gy that has been likened to dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cates of authen­tic­i­ty and which enthu­si­asts tout as the future of every­thing from art and col­lectibles to the inter­net itself. Buoyed by soar­ing cryp­to prices, NFTs became a $40 bil­lion mar­ket last year.

And as a dig­i­tal move­ment built on over­whelm­ing pos­i­tiv­i­ty, the NFT com­mu­ni­ty showed few signs of let­ting the recent mar­ket issues shake its confidence.

“It’s a build mar­ket,” said Travis Wright, a co-host of the Bad Cryp­to pod­cast and one of the MCs of the event’s main speak­er stage on Tues­day in Radio City Music Hall. The con­fer­ence rent­ed the leg­endary the­ater with help from spon­sors like Coin­base, the largest U.S. cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange, which recent­ly announced it was lay­ing off about 1,100 employ­ees, about 18% of its staff.

“Did you feel at this con­fer­ence that some­how this is tough right now?” said Joel Comm, Wright’s pod­cast part­ner and co-MC. “No, this is great stuff.”

Bored Apes
Bored Ape NFTs are dis­played on pil­lars in the base­ment of Radio City Music Hall dur­ing NFT NYC.Julius Con­stan­tine Motal / NBC News

Inside the Mar­riott Mar­quis near­by, where the con­fer­ence has rent­ed six floors, crowds packed the hall­ways, flanked by ven­dors tak­ing up almost all avail­able floor space. Many in the crowd, most­ly men rang­ing from teens to late 30s, were in a per­pet­u­al state of pitch­ing their idea for how to improve on what they all seem to agree is the future of art and dig­i­tal collectibles.

The NFT mar­ket grew slow­ly for sev­er­al years and then explod­ed in 2021. But prices for some NFTs have dra­mat­i­cal­ly plum­met­ed, and the num­ber of accounts trad­ing NFTs has final­ly declined this year.

Mean­while, the broad­er cryp­to mar­ket has also declined sig­nif­i­cant­ly. Ethereum, the cryp­tocur­ren­cy that serves as the back­bone of the major­i­ty of NFT and oth­er Web3.0 projects, is now worth some­where between a third and a quar­ter of what it was for most of the past year. 

But atten­dance at NFT.NYC is pro­ject­ed by the event’s orga­niz­er to triple from its last meet­ing in Novem­ber. Unde­terred by the “cryp­to win­ter,” atten­dees paid between $599 and $1,999 for tick­ets, then wait­ed in lines that stretched around the block to get into the Marriott.

And many of the atten­dees who spoke with NBC News offered a mix of opti­mism and inevitabil­i­ty around NFT tech­nol­o­gy. Many still view it as ear­ly days for NFTs, ripe for peo­ple to exper­i­ment with their own projects.

David Ange­lo, who along with three friends start­ed an NFT art project called Naughty Giraffes, a col­lec­tion of 10,000 giraffe car­toons, said he has long-term faith in the technology.

“Not everybody’s going to make it,” said Ange­lo, who wore a giraffe cos­tume to the con­fer­ence. “Not everybody’s going to be able to get to the promised land, which might be longer than we all hope and we all expect.”

Like many atten­dees, Ange­lo, an ear­ly cryp­to adopter, said he was per­son­al­ly fine weath­er­ing the cryp­to win­ter and that he viewed it as an invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty rather than a sign that the NFT mar­ket had peaked. But he acknowl­edged that peo­ple who had just invest­ed into the space before the crash could be left hold­ing the bag.

He’s not alone in his long-term opti­mism. Despite the crash, ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists con­tin­ue to invest in NFT and oth­er Web 3.0 companies.

Fal­conX, a plat­form for trad­ing dig­i­tal assets, was val­ued at $8 bil­lion in a new fund­ing round, the com­pa­ny said Wednes­day. Mag­ic Eden, an NFT mar­ket­place that launched in 2021, just raised an addi­tion­al $130 mil­lion. And Meta pub­lished an NFT-for-begin­ners guide on Wednes­day, part of the company’s broad­er push to con­vince its users that it’s the home of vir­tu­al worlds.

Some also see real-world appli­ca­tions. Jeanne Ander­son, the co-founder and CEO of Dan­vas, a com­pa­ny that plans to sell screens as can­vas­es for dig­i­tal art, said at NFT.NYC that art gal­leries that had heav­i­ly invest­ed in NFTs were still embrac­ing that mar­ket despite the downturn.

Jeanne Anderson is the co-founder of Danvas
Jeanne Ander­son is the co-founder of Dan­vas, which makes high-end screens to dis­play NFTs.Julius Con­stan­tine Motal / NBC News

“Every­one knew that the win­ter was com­ing,” she said. “It came a lit­tle faster than some peo­ple esti­mat­ed, but no one went into 2022 think­ing that there wouldn’t be a peri­od of change.”

“There’re very few insti­tu­tion­al muse­ums out there that are imme­di­ate­ly respon­sive to trends. That’s just not what a muse­um gen­er­al­ly is about,” Ander­son said.

Still, she said she was lucky to get $7 mil­lion in fund­ing for her com­pa­ny in Decem­ber, soon before the crash.

A Snoop Dogg impersonator
A Snoop Dogg imper­son­ator makes an appear­ance at NFT NYC in New York on Tues­day.Julius Con­stan­tine Motal / NBC News

“It would be tough to start your fundrais­ing at this moment, for sure,” she said. “I guess I feel lucky that we fundraised when we did.”

NFT skep­tics con­tin­ue to express con­cerns about the community’s propen­si­ty to over­promise and at times fudge the details. At one point in a Mar­riott hall­way, a secu­ri­ty guard cleared the way for some­one who appeared to be rap­per Snoop Dogg, who sells brand­ed NFTs

Only upon clos­er inspec­tion was it clear that the man was an imper­son­ator hired by an NFT com­pa­ny, and that his offi­cial con­fer­ence badge read “Doop Snogg.”



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