The huge challenge facing the NFT ecology

In the early morning of June 28th, Beijing time, Hongdou launched a new round of NFT sales. However, this pre-sale ushered in the condemnation of the entire community:

The pre-sale time is too short, the experience is stuck, and the price is too high. What’s worse is that the NFT sold turned out to be an imitation version of Red Bean, and some pictures are even the original image of Red Bean. rough.

After the sale, the price of red beans immediately dropped by 30%, and the price of small beans immediately dropped by 40%. A blue-chip NFT endowed with popular expectations has completely collapsed.

Seeing this result, I remembered the situation of communicating with several friends in the circle on a weekend about three weeks ago.

At that time we talked about NFT, we talked about Boring Ape and Red Bean.

We all expressed embarrassment at the current progress of Boring Ape, and felt that this project was becoming more and more “exhausted”:

It’s not that the project team is not doing a good job—in fact, it has delivered far more than any other project in the NFT ecosystem.

It’s not that the project team is not working hard enough -------- its dedication along the way is obvious to all in the entire NFT ecosystem and recognized by the community.

Instead, I feel that the results it delivers are farther and farther than the expectations of the community and even users outside the community. **

The reasons for this situation, I think, may be the following:

**First of all, it is a road that no one has traveled for NFT to move from the virtual to the real. There is no ready-made experience for reference on this road, so it is extremely difficult and full of risks. **

To go smoothly, the team has to be cautious on the one hand to avoid making mistakes; on the other hand, it has to be bold and innovative to continue to meet the community’s ever-increasing expectation threshold.

And this seems to be a pair of seemingly contradictory requirements, because it is difficult to have bold innovation if you are cautious; and it is inevitable to make mistakes if you want to achieve bold innovation.

Secondly, Boring Ape has now opened up two routes, one is a small number of elite games in mechs; the other is a popular civilian game in Monkey Land. These two routes are completely different in terms of thinking and value orientation---------It’s like Hermès has to manage both a luxury brand and a mass brand.

The biggest difficulty in this mode of operation is how to prevent the two types of brands with different positioning from pulling each other and interfering with each other, which will lead to mutual losses.

This seems to be the first exploration and attempt in the NFT project.

It can be said that the Boring Ape team is now facing great challenges.

Many holders have already felt this challenge and perceived this kind of exhaustion, thinking that it may be difficult to make further breakthroughs in the next project, so they have sold the Boring Ape they held in their hands.

This caused the floor price of Boring Ape to drop further, and the confidence of the community began to shake.

Contrary to the boring ape, the floor price of red beans has risen steadily in the previous period.

Regarding this phenomenon at the time, I thought it might be because the Boring Ape focused the attention of the public and carried all the dissatisfaction and pressure down, so the red bean, which is second only to it in consensus, can go into battle lightly, even if it only needs to maintain the current state. It can maintain the consensus of the community and maintain the price of the project.

At this time, it may be the safest project to “do nothing”.

Because as long as you do something, everyone will definitely compare what you do with what Boring Ape has done. If you can’t exceed what Boring Ape has done, everyone’s expectations will be disappointed, and the price of the project may not be guaranteed.

The Boring Ape has basically tried all the paths that can be tried, and it has basically set up a ceiling for each path. In this case, how likely are other teams to surpass it if they do the same thing?

The option of “doing nothing” is also a very risky approach.

One is that everyone’s patience is limited. If the project can make a breakthrough before everyone’s patience is exhausted, then it’s okay, but if the project exhausts everyone’s patience and still has no new moves, then the project is waiting to die.

The second is that if a new team creates a new model during this process, it is entirely possible to come from behind and surpass the old blue chips.

So** the entire NFT ecology is currently facing great challenges: the top brand is experiencing fatigue from lack of creativity; other projects are facing the danger of being blocked before and followed by pursuers. **

Speaking of Hongdou, what I don’t understand the most about this team is that using such an NFT sale to deliver to the community feels that the road ahead is difficult, so they simply seize the last “opportunity” while the project is still hot?

Such a team is really disappointing the community that has always been loyal to it. Reminiscent of the previous experience of the project founder, I am afraid this is another manifestation of hard-won habits.

Even if such a team is creative and good at marketing, it will be difficult to do a good project for a long time, so I sold all the red beans, small beans and project airdrops without hesitation.

**The collapse of red bean is not only a huge blow to the entire NFT ecology, but also pushes all the pressure and expectations of the entire ecology to the boring ape. **

It can be said that Boring Ape is facing more pressure and challenges than any other project in the entire encryption community, because it carries the expectations of a track.

Never before has a project focused on such high expectations. Even in the process of the rise of Ethereum, there has never been a saying that if Ethereum fails, what will happen to this track.

In the long run, I am still optimistic about the NFT track and believe that more good projects will emerge.

But as far as the moment is concerned, Boring Ape may have to go alone on this track and experience even greater storms ahead.