What does Hive have to do in order to take full advantage of the NFT craze, and establish itself as a dominant player in the market?
First of all we must explore whether that is a relevant question or not. Is the current NFT boom just a passing fad? Or are we simply seeing the starting of a new market and NFTs are here to stay?
Tulips From Digital Land
The story of tulip mania is an oft told story in finance used to warn against fad investing. The 'tulip bubble' is perhaps the most famous example of a bubble bursting in history.
In the late 1500s cultivation techniques got to a point whereby tulips could be grown in less than a year, dramatically reducing the previous 12-year cycle.
The new tulips were striped with different colours and immediately became sought after. Before long simply owning a striped tulip would make the owner wealthy, as the price just kept going up and up.
Soon, derivative markets sprang up and people started leveraging their tulip stakes, whilst others borrowed in order to get in on the action. Tulips were trading on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and everything was good.
Ultimately the prices came crashing down and people lost a lot of money, those in leveraged positions found themselves severely out of pocket as the borrowers could not afford to pay for promised assets.
You can draw a lot of parallels between NFTs and tulips, however unlike tulips NFTs are unique, non fungible tokens. Any tulip was practically the same as another, therefore when one fell they all fell.
NFTs On Hive
At the moment there seems to be a set way to work out which NFTs you should buy and which you should avoid. First of all you want to check out the community, and the only way of doing this at the moment is checking out the Twitter and joining the Discord for the particular NFT you're interested in.
This is where I think Hive can steal a march on the competition. We already have a ready made blogging platform and the ability to create communities on said platform.
Why is this such an advantage? Well, whilst Discord is a very useful tool and does indeed have its place. The difference is on Hive you're able to organically browse way more NFTs than you can if you're searching them individually and joining specific Discord channels.
Of course there are ways to browse NFTs at the moment, however it is much more interesting and informative to be able to read blog posts and comments, read past posts and generally gauge what the community is like.
When it comes to producing and listing NFTs, what better way to promote than to start a community?
The Roadmap
Hive NFT Wallet
As far as I'm aware you cannot look at your Hive NFTs in a private wallet, and that is a problem. For instance if you purchase something from the Hive Punks collection you can only view it on that site.
Now whilst I, and anyone who has been on Hive for more than five minutes, trust @markymark implicitly. New people coming into the ecosystem don't even know who he is. On top of all that, the best crypto systems are the ones that don't require trust to function optimally.
Ideally the NFT wallet will be both on the Hive.blog site and as a standalone product. I think once we have this Hive NFT growth will accelerate exponentially.
Hive Branding
In going forward with NFT Dapps or otherwise, we have to make sure that the Hive branding is strong.
Why does this matter?
The answer is simple, the brand has to be strong so that users, especially new ones, understand that they are interacting with the Hive blockchain, this in turn will entice them to stay on-chain.
At the moment the branding is a bit all over the place, we have a plethora of mirror sites and dapps which are not strongly branded, therefore there is no reason to expect that a new user coming across 3Speak or PeakD will have any idea that they are on Hive. NFT Showroom does state that it's on the Hive blockchain, but it would have been nice if they'd called it HiveNFTs or Hive NFT Showroom.
Splinter NFTs
Splinterlands has been a roaring success, it has over 300,000 users and is played daily with some cards being worth tens of thousands of dollars.
The game is a card game akin to Magic The Gathering, the cards have different attributes and can be used in competition against other players and cash can be won in the form of Hive.
In this regard Splinterland cards are also NFTs with the added bonus that they can be out there working for you!
Going forwards we need to shout about this much more, Splinterlands is an established platform and it is earning money for people in a variety of ways.
Summary
The NFT craze will settle down and there will be a bunch of casualties in the form of dead projects and useless tokens. However Hive is perfectly placed to take advantage of the current NFT phenom and to be part of the cream that rises to the top.
Going forward we just need a few more tools and some good collaboration between core developers along with a strong brand to take us into this exciting future.
The future is bright, the future is Hive!
WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THE CURRENT NFT SITUATION? IS IT JUST A BUBBLE WAITING TO BURST OR ARE THEY HERE TO STAY? IS HIVE PARTICULARLY GOOD FOR NFTS OR SHOULD WE BE CONCENTRATING ON OTHER THINGS?
AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Cryptogee