gm Bankless Nation, In recent years, the NFT meta has shifted from “exclusive digital luxury items” toward “accessible digital memorabilia.” What comes next?
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Take NFTs, for instance. When crypto transactions were much more expensive a few years ago, people were trading NFTs on secondary markets for large sums totaling billions of dollars. That activity has since subsided, and in its place has risen a new consumer behavior: minting low-cost NFT collections on social apps like Zora and Rodeo.
For example, consider Yuga Labs' infamous Otherside mint. Not only did each plot deed cost ~$6,000 to mint, but the massive interest also caused major congestion on Ethereum, sending transaction fees skyrocketing across the network.
However, since then blockspace has exploded atop Ethereum, with more than 100 Layer 2s now offering fast and cheap transactions. They're only going to get cheaper, too, as the Dencun upgrade recently showed us.
This shift has made it easier to buy and create and collect NFTs. But it's also come alongside a cultural shift here.
Except for cryptoart and the very largest PFP collections, many people have migrated away from NFTs as expensive and exclusive luxury goods with huge secondary markets toward approaching them as affordable and accessible digital memorabilia collected non-speculatively.
Accelerating this trend has been the rise of open edition mints (come one, come all) and the rise of onchain social (Farcaster, Lens, Zora, etc.). L2s under the hood bring it all together. When I want to collect a post on Rodeo, it costs me ~$0.25 in ETH, which I don't think twice about.
For the foreseeable future, I expect we'll increasingly see NFTs becoming more integral components of digital identity and onchain social interactions. I don't mint a Rodeo post at $0.25 to flip it. I do it to express my taste onchain and supportively connect with a creator I admire.
The “luxury” NFT category will always exist and is still compelling in various ways. It's just that its prominence has subsided as tech advancements and cultural shifts have made participation around NFTs more accessible in general. And that's a good thing!
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