In recent days, Azuki's NFT sales have triggered industry doubts about PFP. Some people believe that PFP has become a thing of the past, and even believe that NFT is an outright scam. In fact, most people are still in a relatively confused stage. A good project, as long as it pays a little attention, will not do such obvious things to fool community users. This is also the reason why most people do not understand this matter.
First of all, let’s not talk about the Azuki incident. From another perspective, have you noticed that many projects, even excellent projects, when they go downhill, are basically caused by some very speechless or even brainless negative news. After such news, there are often a few people who still have illusions and expect the project to rise again, but the facts are not as they wish. Basically, such projects will gradually disappear from people’s sight with the arrival of the bull market.
Note that this is not a single project, but many projects. We will not talk about the recent ones. Let's take the "eight kings" projects discussed by many people in the currency circle as an example. EOS, the project party raised a huge amount of funds and then stopped working. In the end, the project was unfinished. Now the community is taking power and leading, which is also a good ending. The highest price was 16u, and now it is around 0.6u. ICP, which once reached a price of thousands of u, is currently around 4u. The project has no results for a long time and gradually faded out of people's sight. FIL is the highest at 230u, and is currently around 4u. Various events occurred during the launch of the main network, and miners lost money in mining. This year, it turned to the EVM virtual machine, which is also a enlightenment. FTT, FTX exchange misappropriated funds and caused a collapse. In addition, there are many well-known and unknown projects that have hackers stealing coins, internal conflicts within the team, the project party's funds have been spent and returned to the community, and there have been no dynamics and have been delisted by the exchange. Among them, internal conflicts and dissolution of the team were common routines in the last bear market. The main routine in this bear market is hackers stealing coins, but in fact they are stealing from the inside or playing with users.
Why does this happen? In fact, for a project, the project party itself must know the current situation of the project better than the team. It stands to reason that if the project can be successful, it means that the project itself has a certain strength to lead the market. However, the fact is just the opposite. Many projects often have all kinds of incredible negative information, which eventually leads to the exodus of community users.
If there are only one or two projects like this, most people may think that this is an isolated case, but many projects are like this now, which forces people to reflect on whether the users are too easy to talk to or whether this kind of negativity is intentional. We are more inclined to believe that this is an incident directed and acted by the project party, or that they deliberately intend to abandon the project but cannot be too direct. It is even possible that the project party actively conducts a "stress test" on the community to test the tolerance of community users to negative news, so as to facilitate the customization of the harvesting plan in the next stage. After the bear market came, many projects have negative information, so this has to make people think that this is one of the deliberately customized plans, rather than the project party or the founding team underestimating user expectations or overestimating the delivery of project pictures.
Next, let’s go back to Azuki. We can basically determine that this incident was most likely intentional by the project owner. There are actually two main reasons why the community complained and was indignant about Azuki:
1. Pricing is too high
A high price means that users need a higher market price if they want to make a profit, and this price needs the project party to work to maintain it. Obviously, the project party may be more concerned about selling pictures and transaction royalties, and these two do not require any costs, as long as the atmosphere is set. Therefore, it is expected that the funds obtained from the sale of pictures cannot be too high. Once it is too high to reach the expected profit of the project party, they may give up the market protection behavior because the purpose itself has been achieved. The overpricing of Azuki this time is actually a potential factor.
In addition, supporting the market is an expenditure behavior, and it is possible that the money earned cannot be recovered. After all, for the project parties, when faced with high returns, they will often give up supporting the market and choose to let it develop. Finally, when the price drops to a certain level, they will consider using part of the funds to enter the market to buy, so as to set a good example and prepare for the next harvest plan.
When the price is too high, the project party has actually made the profit and will rarely consider the community's feelings, especially when their goals are achieved. In the Azuki generation, the actual selling price was not very high, and the later price increase theoretically had little to do with the project party. Therefore, after the first opening of the map, the project party will choose to pull the price up even if it is to make more money, so that they can make a profit. The second time, they made a high profit in one step. If they choose to pull the price up this time, on the one hand, they will have to spend a lot of profits. On the other hand, the plate is big, and pulling the price up is not that simple. There is a certain probability of failure, which will be more than worth the loss.
When the market is too big, it is best not to protect it. Letting the bullets fly for a while may be a good choice for the project party. When negative emotions are prevalent, they may buy at the bottom to set an example, or even establish a "good guy image", attributing the factors of the incident to "lack of consideration" and "too high community expectations".
2. Too perfunctory
As long as the project party puts a little effort into hiring a few illustrators and spending tens of thousands of dollars, they can produce a bunch of high-quality pictures, and they are just selling their own brand. However, once even these "high-quality pictures" start to be sloppy, it is obviously unacceptable. The cost paid by the project party itself is relatively low. If they don't want to pay this cost, then they may really be doing it intentionally to create negative news.
If the image quality is slightly unsatisfactory, it may cause negative amplification, and this situation often requires the project party to pay attention to it, but they are too perfunctory about this sale.
NFT is not like other blockchain projects. It does not require high technical strength and expenditure. If other projects have various problems in function use, people will still expect it to get better, just like sei and starknet. There are many problems on the sei chain, and the project party has unlimited PUA. Although many people cursed and said that they would no longer interact with the Sei project, in fact, there are still many people who have not given up. They cursed and cursed, but they still did what they had to do.
Starknet is similar. When it is crowded, a transaction has to wait for nearly half an hour. During this half hour, three Bitcoin blocks have been produced, and users cannot speed up transactions. Even so, many people still flock to it. On the one hand, it is because of the airdrop factor, and on the other hand, it is because the technical reasons can be fixed. It is only a matter of time. People still expect the project to get better and better because the project party has not given up on the project.
But NFT is different. First of all, the cost of NFT projects, especially PFP projects, is very low. A good picture only costs tens of thousands of dollars and there are many professional painters to do it. These NFTs are often sold for hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and the project owners still have a lot of NFTs. Therefore, the probability of an NFT project reaching the million-level is also very high. It can be seen that the investment and return ratio of NFT projects is currently the highest, and if the project owner wants to achieve the effect of "explosive products", he only needs to devote energy to publicity. Therefore, compared with technical projects, NFT projects pay more attention to the attitude of the project owner towards the project.
In other words, for technology projects, even if you don't pay attention to community operations or the feelings of community users, as long as the technology is good enough, users will naturally promote it and institutions will naturally pay for it. The threshold for NFT projects is low, so you need to please users at all times, such as pushing up the floor price, guiding users to promote the project, and expanding brand awareness. In terms of attitude, you need to attach importance to the community's feedback and psychological feelings. If you are too perfunctory, it will naturally lead to failure.
Bear markets need bubbles to burst
At present, most projects are still surviving, perhaps they also hope to wait until the bull market comes, when those who should reap the profits will continue to reap the profits, and those who should issue coins will continue to issue coins. However, in fact, if a batch of old projects do not disappear, this situation will hardly exist. We can see that there are indeed too many blockchain projects at present. In addition to the thousands of projects that have issued coins, there are many more projects that have not issued coins. They may continue to adhere to their beliefs or build, or wait for an opportunity to take advantage of a wave of hot spots to reap the profits, or want to wait until the bull market to issue coins. However, if all their wishes are realized or even half of the current projects can survive the bull market, then there will be thousands of old projects in the early stage of the next bull market, which is obviously contrary to common sense.
Therefore, we can boldly speculate that before the next bull market arrives, the market must be deeply cleaned to get some junk projects out of the market. Only in this way, in the early stage of the bull market, people will pay more attention to the changes brought about by high-quality projects, and thus attract potential funds from outside the circle. Therefore, from this perspective, the bubble bursting in the bear market is more of a preparation for the bull market, and for investors, they still need to be cautious in participating in the hot projects in the bear market, so as not to fall in the dark world before dawn.