Fear and loathing at NFT NYC
NFT NYC. What can I say?
I'm cynical about conferences at the best of times. I've been around tech long enough to know how they play out. Self-promotional speakers get up on a soap box to shill their own products. Endless parades of startup T-shirts. And by the last day, bleary-eyed, hung over, exhausted delegates who miss their kids and never want to see a vodka soda again.
NFT NYC was a rerun of the same program. With 1500 speakers, there would never be enough thoughtfulness to make it a curated lineup. With that number of people, it would always be a signal-to-noise issue.
And the products? Most of what I saw presented was pre-alpha quality at best. The tech wasn't there. The user experience wasn't there. The business models weren't there. Founders were there rocking merch, while the earliest MVP of their product was months away.
The messages from the vast majority of speakers seemed to be roughly the same:
1. We're early
2. Unregistered securities rule
3. Buy My stuff
NFT awards seemed like a terrible idea in the abstract. The good news is - they were a terrible idea in practice, too. The highlight for me was Bobby Hundreds commenting that they had no idea they were up for an award and didn't know who the hell turned up to accept it on their behalf. If the Oscars feel like a circle jerk...
The parties were disappointing, to say the least. One event featured two panels where the audience listened respectfully and one panel where the audience decided it was open-season on loud conversations, to the point that the organizers had to beg people to show respect. Guess which panel was the one featuring women?
I loved some of the energy. I loved the passion. I loved seeing so many people so excited about new technology. I loved hearing the stories of how NFTs had already made a difference in people's lives. But the conference itself was...not what anyone who truly believes in this space would hope for.
I was incredibly happy with what MODA and Emanate achieved together; launching our Genesis technology with the biggest party of the week, a festival featuring deadmau5, Noizu, Nero, and Brux with 5,000 punters, is something I am proud to count in my biggest achievements of the past few years.
But If I was giving advice for next year’s official conference - it would be simple.
Stop pitching a conference.
Pitch a festival with a tech component.
Make it about the music, the art, the fashion. Make it about the people and the culture. Then, as a part of that festival, have a conference with thoughtful tracks and robust discussion. And most importantly - keep the numbers small. 1500 speakers are too many. 500 would be better. 100 would be better than that.
This is a community that is built on connection and relationships. That's what we should be celebrating.
When the smoke clears from NFT NYC, what remains will be interesting to see. The event, planned with hype during an epic bull run, has played out this week in a nightmare macro-financial scenario and a crypto crash that has wiped out the treasuries of thousands of projects and users.
The euphoria of the panels, speeches, and excitement will not last when we go home and face the reality of building in a bear market, where crypto is down, where mainstream adoption has been delayed, and where the funding has dried up. I would suggest that NFT NYC was not representative of where this industry will be in 6 months.
Hype trends don't last in tech. But the perception that the death of the hype means the end of the industry is wildly incorrect. We might not be flying high anymore, but crypto isn't over. It's just getting started.
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