The rise of the NFT has developed alongside many technological advancements in blockchain as a whole. Decentralized storage solutions, ZK Rollups and L2 Chains, Ethereum's switch to PoS, the list goes on… But the rise of the NFT was built on something else: community. Here's the problem, these communities gathered on a weak foundation - profiting.

When everyone is making money, it's easy to build community and keep people excited. When everyone is losing money, it's even easier to lose your entire community. Now the interesting part - the majority of NFT investors of 2020-22 convinced themselves they were investing because of future utility of their tokens, and NFT founders capitalized on this fact in an enormous way. But as we have seen , now a year into the bear market, a vast majority of these promises were false - and investors faith in promises of utility have crumbled along with their wallet balances.

Even some projects that delivered "utility" in a huge way, like Axie Infinity, saw their own demise quickly once they ran out of people afflicted with the bull market craze - without new players coming in (because they heard you can make money), the economy crumbled. It's really a chicken or egg situation - did people stop joining because there was less financial incentive, or did people start making less money because there were less people joining?

So what's left?

I believe the projects remaining have one thing in common: they have brought entertainment value to their investors - and this came first. Whether this be in the form of festivals, games, storytelling, or simply community events - the projects still hanging in there have brought value to their investors in the form of fun, with any monetary incentive being secondary or even tertiary. It makes it a lot easier to hold onto a dwindling bag if you are enjoying yourself while you do it.

So what's next?

Will people fall for the false promises of utility once the bull market craze fills the air once again? How will projects continue delivering entertainment value to their holders? With advancements in metaverse technology, AI, and blockchain gaming we could see real valuable utility coming to NFT projects -

But wait - we've left out another essential aspect to NFTs and people's interest in them: identity. This is the means through which you interface with the aforementioned community. Identity is the reason the top projects consist of avatars with billions of possible unique iterations. People want to feel unique, while also being part of a larger family. Identity is the driving force behind the importance of digital ownership in the first place. So, 2D NFT avatar pictures have got us this far… but will people stay satisfied with their hexagonal twitter picture and ens username?

I believe your NFTs are going to zero…

Unless they can provide entertainment and identity in a way their community truly values. I think the majority of people will be much more discerning in their investments, which makes it all that more important for NFT projects to know their customers - and deliver what they want. And with the rise of the metaverse and blockchain gaming in the next couple years - I believe people are going to want playable versions of their 2D NFTs, and to be able to play with these characters across their favorite games and worlds. This is a vision many have shared, but has become more possible recently with advancements made in game development, like the Emergence SDK making it easy for developers to get NFTs in their games, Improbable's M² network enabling massive online virtual events, and the Metaverse Standards Forum setting the guidelines for interoperable game assets.

With that being said, GetCrspy is doing our part in delivering on this vision with our avatar builder. We are currently in development of this tool that will enable NFT projects to deliver playable avatars attributed to their holder's unique NFTs in a fraction of the time it would take to hand assemble them - then export them to a number of metaverses and games that we are partnered with, or use them in GetCrspy's own game worlds. We are excited to share more details on this development in the coming months! Stay tuned and join our discord to chat with fellow artists, degens, and metaverse enthusiasts!