Today, the development of the NFT market has reached a new turning point, including technology, community, and activity, without exception, showing strong potential. (The changes in NFT from 2020 to 2021 can be seen in "NFT in 2021. A wave of enthusiasm " ) Such potential energy has also attracted the attention of the capital market. Institutions including Grayscale Funds, Hedge Fund Coatue Management, CoinFund and other institutions have entered the market, forming an investment boom for the NFT industry.
KOL's forward-looking grayscale aims at NFT investment booming
Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Paradigm and Coinbase, a top venture capital firm, published a post on Twitter on January 25, 2021 to summarize the frontier trends of cryptocurrency. From 2009 to 2017, it belongs to the store of value (Store of value), from 2018 to 2020. It belongs to Decentralized Finance (DeFi), and may be a non-fungible token (NFT) in 2021. Although this is only a personal prediction of the market trend, the various investment events since the beginning of the year seem to have confirmed his statement.
In the list of four newly registered trust funds announced by Grayscale recently, the Flow public chain, which focuses on the fields of NFT encrypted games and encrypted art, includes them. Obviously, the NFT infrastructure represented by Flow is being paid attention to by well-known investment institutions and even aroused the interest of crypto asset trust fund giants. This choice points to indirectly inject a booster into the development of the entire NFT infrastructure, and with the help of the entire The market has played a role in the influence of gray scale, and NFT assets have also found a very bright value export.
In addition to the gray scale, many head investment institutions have differently locked their eyes on the NFT field. In the past two weeks, fantasy football game Sorare has received US$50 million in financing, NFT blockchain game development team Dapper Labs has received US$250 million, NFT loan platform NFTfi has completed US$890,000 in financing, and interactive content creation platform Playcent has completed US$1 million. Financing, decentralized autonomous organization Yield Guild Games completed 1.3 million US dollars in financing, NFT creation platform Curio completed 1.2 million US dollars in financing, NFT trading platform Mintable received investment from billionaire and Dallas Maverick owner Mark Cuban... including Coatue Management, Well-known investment institutions in different fields such as Coinbase, Coinfund, Future Perfect Ventures, Benchmark Capital, a16z, Digital Currency, etc. lead or participate in the investment.
From the perspective of project investment amount, NFT has achieved a multiplier growth. According to previous reports, in July 2020, Sorare completed a seed round of 4 million US dollars. In December 2020, Sorare received 430 investment from Barcelona Football Club star Gerard Piqué. In the last time, Sorare's total financing amount reached 60 million US dollars. This continuous investment and the remittance of multiple-level funds illustrates to a certain extent the market's optimistic trend for the project itself and its industry. From the perspective of the number of investment and financing events, investment events in the field of NFT have become more and more frequent, and compared with the scale of nearly one million dollars in DeFi applications, the investment volume of NFT is obviously tens of millions of dollars. More favored by capital.
Looking back at the entire NFT investment thread, the crypto cat game collection can only be regarded as a personal carnival. The small test of the investment boom in 2020 can only be regarded as the "hidden line" of investment in DeFi, and there has been no stop investment event this year. In terms of the frequency of occurrence, NFT has become an indispensable rule in the investment industry. The investment balance in various vertical fields of the blockchain is constantly tilting towards NFT, and it is an industry behavior oriented by giant institutions. The investment melody throughout the year set the mainstream tone.
Capital entry will push NFT out of the circle
A pair of socks sells for $160,000, and a tweet is auctioned for $2.5 million, but this is not the end. The recent NFT market transaction has ushered in an explosive spring, and more and more new records have been broken and created. For such an unstoppable market purchasing power, we can take the NFT giant whale WhaleShark’s Twitter post to explain, “Digital is also a An economic choice. All these trends point to the natural migration of human beings towards digitalization. In this process, technology is required to confirm the source and rarity of assets, and provide real ownership and management rights. The future of NFT is so bright, I need to do Good sun protection measures.” To be sure, digitization is becoming an inflection point milestone for the future industry, and NFT happens to be a useful starting point at this inflection point.
Since Ethereum's decentralized financial application (DeFi) has been proven to be a sustainable and profitable business model, NFT is a very unique existence and has created good results one after another. According to data from DappRadar, the average NFT price reached a peak of 4334.21U on February 22, 2021, which was 40 times that of six months ago. On the same day, the NFT market volume reached $64 million, which was about one hundred times the volume of six months ago. Various data show that the industry's interest in the NFT market is heating up. In particular, well-known institutions including LVMH, the owner of luxury brands such as Marvel, NBA, and LV, have entered the arena, making this NFT outbreak an unprecedented value pull, which strongly promotes the further growth of the NFT market value. With the strong market penetration brought about by IP rendering and market influence, more and more small and medium-sized people will be attracted to join this business revolution.
In essence, the reason why the NFT that has been open all the way needs to be ignited by the desire is that the value of the NFT really comes into play. Different from the sensation created by CryptoKitties in 2017, the entire market in 2021 is showing a "fast and accurate" pace. After three years of dormancy and waiting, NFT experimented with possible scenarios and continuously brought value to the market. To advance to a broader space, this expression of value not only shows a huge space for creation and imagination in intellectual property, art collections, game props, etc., but also forms a creative concept for the encrypted world in IP, physical industries, and sports areas. , And unique and sharp forward-looking yearning. In terms of objective development, the size of NFT in the entire encryption world is insignificant, but in terms of the development of the entire industry, NFT is the most likely intermediate medium to introduce real entities to the chain, and it will become a DeFi replica tradition. The special innovation after the financial scene breaks away from the outdated forms such as idling and matryoshka, forming a very distinctive market value expression structure, which ultimately exists in all aspects of our daily lives, and is the "target" value of various entities in the digital age.
Which projects should we focus on next?
The NFT field includes infrastructure, developer tools, market transactions, virtual reality, games and other upper-level applications. According to incomplete statistics, it has reached 175+. There are also 100+ various types of NFT tokens. Therefore, the whole ecology is in a state of contention among a hundred schools of thought. So, among so many projects, which ones can we focus on?
- Flow: Backed by many investment institutions, strong ability to integrate resources
Flow is another public chain that focuses on NFT encrypted games and encrypted art in 2021. It was created by the former crypto kitty game development team Dapper Labs. It is a cutting-edge public chain that is appreciated by capital. Unlike other public chains, Flow's expansion speed and throughput performance are superior. In terms of architecture design, nodes are responsible for participating in one of the links of collection, consensus, execution, and verification, instead of investing in the verification link of the entire transaction. Greatly improve the network operating speed. Flow has achieved outstanding results and has successfully drained traffic based on the card project NBA Top Shot developed based on it, and has become the development infrastructure for many NFT applications. In February of this year, Flow announced that it will incorporate the NFT trading platform Opeansea into the ecosystem. It can be said that the capital and technology are very strong. Flow is advancing quickly and may occupy an important position in the future market.
- Opensea: The world's largest encrypted digital collection market or the next "Uni"
Opensea covers the broadest categories and the most transferable digital collections, and is a place for exchanges for mainstream NFTs. Due to the high gas fee of Ethereum, many NFT projects cannot grow quickly, which indirectly reduces the activity of NFT. Opense sees the problem and seizes the market through the pre-issuance mechanism. Its appearance greatly reduces the cost of NFT casting and issuance, and provides a low-threshold channel choice for NFT. The trading venue model created by Opensea will enable NFT to move away from Ethereum and WAX, and gain the possibility of project growth in more diverse ways.
- Polygon: Competing for Lay2 track aggregator focusing on games and NFT
Polygon plans to become the first Layer 2 solution aggregator on the Ethereum chain to build a modular, universal, and flexible expansion framework for Ethereum to establish and connect the protocol and framework of the Ethereum-compatible blockchain network. Since Polygon is upgraded from Matic, its ecological construction has taken shape on a small scale. According to statistics, there are more than 100 projects in the Polygon ecosystem, and a diversified ecosystem in subdivisions such as games, NFT and DeFi is gradually being built The system, especially in the field of games and NFT, has developed significantly, occupying more than half of the ecosystem. Popular applications such as the virtual reality game platform Decentral Games and the immersive NFT digital collection platform Terra Virtual are all developed based on Polygon.
- NBA Top Shot&CryptoPunks: The long-term value of application leaders is worth looking forward to
NBA Top Shot is a collectible NFT game launched by Dapper Labs. It is officially authorized by the NBA and is currently the hottest NFT project. It has the same origin with CryptoKitties, and both come from the well-known chain game development team in the industry. CryptoPunks is the first NFT project, produced by Larva Labs, with a total of only 10,000 pieces and all were airdropped to community users at the beginning of 2017. As a veteran NFT project, CryptoPunks is currently well recognized by the market and can be regarded as a leader in the field of collectibles.
(Source: cryptoslam)