@bricexeth My lesson learnt: tell your frens how much you’re grateful having them around. Always thank them and be kind, don’t take their lives for granted.
Funny how that works.
About 1.5 years ago I was being clowned, disrespected, called greedy, and bullied for daring to speak up about the concepts of rarity and collectability – which are imho integral parts of NTFs (as they are collectibles at their core) – and warning about how badly structured artificial financial incentives were about to destroy those organic inherent aspects.
Similarly, I have been clowned when speaking about BTC all the way back in 2013/14 when I was picking up some in the three digit range. Nobody wanted to hear about my "funny internet fake money".
People asked me if I wanna die on that hill in both cases, and I decided to do so in both cases.
Fast forward to spring 2026, BTC sits at around 80k and is globally adopted and recognized by some of the biggest players in finance, "bringing back" collectability for NFTs and making "grails matter again". OTC desks for grails are being created, collector profile ideas that I tried to push all back when slowly being picked up by more collections.
In both cases, my opinion was verbatim called "wrong" but turned out to be quite "right" – it just took the wider mass of people a fairly long time to catch on. Reason why one should always be open minded towards what is not status quo or popular belief.
Happy to see the tides shifting finally, but the damage that was done is fairly significant. Artificial financial incentives such as blur farming and suboptimal distributions of token airdrops that treated inherently non-fungible collectibles as fungible (aka interchangeable) financial instruments made "buying stuff one really likes" subpar and punished vs "amassing as much of those assets as possible for as cheap as possible with no attention to detail or personal preference".
Blur's blend loans saw a rampant growth and huge interest due to this unhealthy narrative that has been created by those systemic factors. People begann "looping" floor NFTs (aka basically everything now since traits were pushed more and more into irrelevance) by taking out mass loans on just bought NFTs (which now were more speculative financial instrument than collectible" to buy even more of them (rinse and repeat).
As soon as the liquidity events hit (token drops etc.) those players – quite many of which vultures that long left NFTs now that they cannot extract from them as easily anymore – exited in size, which lead to harsh, toxic, and very extreme unwinds in the loan orderbooks. Sure one can blame those people, but the true issue have been the systems and their intricacies.
Hate the game, not the player!
Grateful and relieved to see that the "makers" of these games (marketplaces, teams, leaders) are finally waking up and addressing these issues now, going back to the roots of NFTs as collectibles and digital identities – instead of mere financial instruments.
Better late than never. Wish many of them listened to the warnings back in the day, over giving in to the sweet whispers of the extractors and "snake oil salesmen" over passionate collectors. But at least many of the latter are gone now and hopefully won't come back.
Cannot turn back time sadly, but can always be hopeful and forward looking for the future! I believe NFTs have what it takes to succeed as what they were always meant to be – despite all obstacles and hurdles along the way.
@Carlitoswa_y Ray Dahlio has attributed this seemingly never ending bull market to causes, such as CTA’s, boomers, Fed put, 401ks, Treasury put. All can, and probably will reverse at some point.
New York’s spring auctions start May 14, led by a 1957 Mark Rothko painting estimated at $70–$100 million, with works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh also featured