Like it or not, the bear market is upon us. Still, the NFT community has continued to weather one of the worst crypto winters we’ve seen since 2017. In response, various community members have taken to building all sorts of zany projects to lighten the collective mood. Whether it’s goblins or people threatening to ‘do it,’ the prevailing school of thought seems to be that now more than ever, the community must continue to build.
Long-time internet entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk would have to agree. When we visited VeeCon last May, we got the chance to speak with various members of the VeeCon team, such as VaynerNFT president Avery Akkineni, and of course, Gary Vee himself on what the future holds for the NFT community.
Despite touting his growing VeeFriends empire as a crucial step in “building the most important intellectual property in the history of mankind,” Vaynerchuk’s vision for NFTs as a whole is a lot more modest. “I think the next big thing is actually boring,” he said. Clarifying this point, Vaynerchuk explained, “The next big thing is 24, 26 months of good, solid, mundane technology building to eliminate [the] friction [that makes this technology] impossibly challenging for the masses.”
Ultimately, Vaynerchuk stated that “VeeCon and VeeFriends’ ambition from day one was to educate through execution.” In the eyes of Akkineni, bigger brands and enterprises would have the most to benefit from the web3 education and onboarding Vaynerchuk and co have been providing.
“I think enterprises should think about NFTs as a way to connect with their consumers in a new fashion. […] Thinking about NFTs is a long-term thing. Thinking about Web3 — they need to be strategic about their moves because this isn’t something that’s going away,” Akkineni said.
Moving forward, Akkineni believes the space is going to become even more community-oriented. “People are about to see a huge wave of builders that are doing things that are de-commercialized,” she said. “Now is an incredible time for people who are committed to this space to do free mints, do low-cost NFTs that allow the community to see really cool things being built without these hyper-inflated prices.”
