LooksRare: The NFT Hypemachine and Community Value

Transcript

thanks everyone for being here i really appreciate it uh my name is alex i'm growth lead at syrian um this has been a really amazing experience for us to be here it's one of the first big conferences that we've done in a while it's actually my first big conference in crypto and like web3 so i just really appreciate it um what we're going to talk about today is something that i think all of us in the industry are pretty familiar with which is like this this hype cycle and the story that goes around what happens when entities blow up and become a big part of our lives and specifically trying to dissect and understand like why that happens disprove a little bit the theory that this happens by accident and by not by

by choice then we're going to talk a little bit about how to define what a community is in nfts like we really want to come up with a definition for how to think about this and then the third thing we're going to do is talk a little bit about some of the trends that that we see at syrian that i've observed coming out of nfts in terms of how they can drive really community value and community empowerment so i mentioned briefly but uh just as a quick intro to me i'm alex and i'm an american but i live in paris so if you're in paris at any time soon hit me up we'll grab a coffee or a glass of wine or anything like that i'm pretty active on so rare gods and chains and forgotten

runes discord so if you're in any of those communities you can definitely reach out to me as well and of course you can get me on twitter at any moment anytime you want to chat just definitely send me a message and we can talk quick note before we jump into the meat of the presentation here about zerion in case you don't know xerion's leading d5 portfolio tracker excuse me with about 200 000 monthly active users we support over 70 protocols and processed over a billion dollars in trading volume recently xerion has been investing an awful lot in nft technology and nft features specifically we've built out the ability to create apple watch faces for your nfts so you can show off your

friends on your apple watch we've built sending features so you can send wallets send nfts to different wallets and we're also building out custom widgets for your iphone and ipad to help you show off your collection make sure you can see all your entities pretty easily and in one place this is all part of our vision for what i think that a lot of people in this space have seen like d5 and nfts have kind of like cousins on two different planes maybe or in two different universes i'm not sure which metaphor fits better but i think over time what we believe at xirian is that this gap this difference between these two worlds is shrinking it's becoming more and more and more one experience and we believe at syrian that

when you track your assets shouldn't really be just d5 tokens or just nfts you should really be able to view that all in one place and so one of the things that we're doing to facilitate that is sirian is launching a wallet it's going to be coming out soon um don't have a firm date on that my my engineers are already raising their eyebrows and me talking about it but if you want to sign up for the wait list our booth's over in the exhibition area we'd love to talk to you and tell you a little bit more about it but to get started i i think that it almost is like a cliche at this point to talk about this hype cycle around nfts the story driven mainly by eye-watering sales figures and crazy amounts of hype and the inescapability

of some nft projects on twitter and online make the nft hype cycle seem something that's almost like chaotic out of control spinning spinning without any kind of real forces behind it or any kind of conscious decision making and i sort of think that there although i reject that narrative i think that there's kind of a little bit to it or at least you can see why if you're not consumed by this on a daily basis if you're not reading and really in this space you can see why people would think this i think that these numbers and some of the stats that could be you know found i mean you can find hundreds of these types of figures all start to contribute to this narrative that nft projects are scammy nft projects don't do anything i mean i'm sure you've

all had this like conversation with people like why you know i could just copy the jpeg these are not like uncommon things but what i think that message ignores is the conscious effort that nfc projects are putting into building their what their real superpower is and that's their community so i don't know i tried to visualize a little bit how this happens and i think that this is not all that unfamiliar or even all that earth-shattering to people in this space but i think that most successful nft projects are building some sort of like flywheel effect where they start on discord or telegram i don't know there starts to be a conversation going on online that eventually bleeds into crypto twitter which beats fomo

openc launch happens prices go crazy and then the discord blows up again and this cycle happens over and over and over again faster and faster and faster and the popular narrative says that's happening sort of by accident it's happening naturally no one's doing anything to to sort of drive that effort and i think that's where it's really wrong nft projects that are succeeding today are creating communities that actually act as the engine that spins that wheel faster they're the wind in the flywheel if we continue the uh the metaphor and specifically they're using participation especially early participation rewards support conversation and interaction as

like the way to then build long-term sustainable impact and visibility for their projects so if we agree and i think at this point it's almost a truism i've heard a number of people up on the stage today talk about how community is everything to nfts what i haven't heard a whole lot about is how we go about defining an nft community an nft community excuse me what is how do we define this term what does it mean we're all saying that it's central to the growth and we believe i certainly believe it that it's central to the growth of an nft project and long-term success but how do we go about defining that so i started looking around searching a bit to try to figure out how i could come up with some definition

that made sense to me and i arrived at this one because after a few different searches i thought that this one sounded like it captured some of the things that i think are present in a lot of nft communities community is a group of people who care about each other and feel they belong together feels okay starts to feel pretty good i think there's elements of that you can sense in a lot of these projects but i don't know i i i think that specifically related to nft is it lacks a lot of real nuance and and detail so i i dug a little bit deeper and came across one that especially related to nfts made sense to me and that's from coindesk michael casey who's saying images basically act as shorthand they

act as like a signifier they're a calling card that allow you to think about how yourself the group that you identify with and how you like conceive of yourself as a as a person and as a digital like actor in this space i think that's pretty good this idea of belonging and membership is really powerful in nft communities but i still think that we could go a little bit further and so to do that i started to look at some other like really successful nft projects that have built strong communities tried to see if i could identify some signals or criteria characteristics that actually defined uh what could make a community successful and thriving so one i think probably most people in the room are familiar with is kong kong uh from the very beginning had an

extremely ambitious vision to build like an a totally new like nation state for lack of a better term and they had calling cash then they started calling land and all this was like a digital community a digital space to rethink citizenship property rights and things like that at some point last year earlier this year actually they issued 500 citizens this this like pack of nft and community features first one was a physical kong kong land passport this passport basically allowed kong the the owners of the passport to cryptographically verify their identity in physical presences which opens up all whole new areas for community engagement and also

authentication they also issued unique uh a unique alpha nft which then sort of solidifies and beefs up the entire like rarity and scarcity principles underpinning the community and then they also actually opened up a access to private discord access to a private discord that allowed those people to like even develop stronger bonds together and so i think that that's a really good example of one type of strong community and there's a lot of areas or or criteria there that i think then show off what a good what a good strong community actually ends up looking like similar example is doing good um doing good if you don't know nft marketplace allows artists and buyers to come together to basically make

purchases and sales that do good for the for the world basically a portion of their sales all go to uh social causes and even more than that the social causes are actually curated by the community the social causes are chosen by the people who are part of this group and this i think important point because it also lowers the barrier for entry to to getting involved in the community you can be involved very very quickly in doing good and i think that they the principles that they outline there are really important when we think about building this solid community base for a strong nft project so parsing out some of these different things i i think that there's really three strong traits that start to emerge

pretty clearly in terms of what bill what makes a strong nft community first one michael casey talked about which is this membership idea right like this idea that i'm belonging to something bigger than myself i'm part of this group i'm part of this this this collective these people all have similar beliefs to me and they all sort of think the same way the second bit is something that doing good is a great example of which is ownership i don't just mean ownership over nfts themselves but i mean ownership over the direction of the collective like the way that the goals and the and the vision that the com the organization has together um there's a degree of ownership there nft members people part of the part of the group feel like they can shift shape

and influence how the nft project functions and the last bit i think that is increasingly a part of of nft communities is this purpose angle this mission driven way of thinking about actually it's sort of similar to the way the dows function where people are committed and motivated by doing something together that they can actually influence and own and change so there's an important aspect of like changing the world here and so i want to propose a different definition for what a community looks like in an nft context and my definition feel free to disagree or add to it this is just my feeling based on this this these observations

is that an nft community is a group of like-minded members empowered emotionally and financially to shape the goals and direction of the group and i think that the reason why i like this is that it encapsulates some of the other things that we found in some of the other definitions that i talked about earlier but it it quantifiably talks about the emotional and financial impact that people can feel by being part of a community an nft community and that for me that's very important and i think that the way we should maybe look at this and transition into the next stage to talk about some of the trends that are even taking that definition and going a little step further first nfts offer communities incredible opportunity and incredible opportunities to access

different member perks um we were talking a little bit about kong earlier but this owning an nft is a fantastic way to do things like granting entry to physical parties or conferences or exclusive data content owning an nft is it makes it really easy to offer membership exclusives and prizes in a way that like is really intuitive and easy to use and also the perks actually end up creating a sustainable system where the um the nfc value goes up for both the external people who might want to enter the community and the community holders themselves so another important trend that i think we're seeing emerge more and more as

communities get stronger is this idea of like nft crossovers nft projects are increasingly going to push and be pushed by their their users their owners to offer shared experiences a good example could be actually infinity and decentralans like maybe your axes are actually interactable playable etc within a decentralized context transversal gameplay and interactivity is i think the way that this is all headed and this notion of crossovers is important because it brings collaboration and brings communities tighter together kind of the last trend and probably one of the most interesting ones i think is this idea of self-rewarding systems nfts are possible now to alter and become rarer as their owners perform

different actions or do things og crystals is a great example of this where an originally simple crystal looks like a rock increases and changes mutates every time it's sold so it increases in value and the nft itself changes and becomes more unique so the community itself is not only incentivized to buy but also to sell pretty regularly because of the fact that it will alter the actual nft itself so i think that this this means that scarcity and rarity for nfts can be actually determined by the community themselves we've actually at xirian look to doing something similar within our own app if we issue an nft for example

um that is basically incentivizing users to perform trades within our platform to swaps to deposit assets to perform swaps etc that could maybe change and and evolve as you go through the process of doing things on xerium there's a whole load of self-rewarding systems that could exist if the if the technology is is implied is utilized correctly and if the communities themselves really want to get excited by it so i kind of want to leave you with the last parting thought um it's i think that for me these nft projects are succeeding because community empowerment and thinking about how to bring is like the maximum value possible is really at

the heart of all they're doing and like we at zurian see this as the progression of a trend where the community is becoming absolutely central to what that nft project stands for and i just want to say thanks to everybody that's it thank you