I would like to make a call and I'll refer to this poast at the end of the bull-run to see how it aged.
This cycle the "NFT run" won't be overwhelmingly be powered by ERC721s or 1155s but it will be ERC 404 as pioneered by @Pandora_ERC404.
I believe that people are sleeping on the standard or only thinking from an extremely binary mindset which is "Oh it's that new shiny toy that has already been pumped and dumped"
While it's already done some numbers and right now used for a lot of "generative art", I believe that people are missing the key idea here.
As you can see, it's already displaced a lot of the "blue chips" NFT collections and it *peaked* at $323m mcap.
The fact that you can trade these in "fractions" of their respective collections is absolutely HUGE and it solves 99% of the problems that NFTs last cycle, which was having no liquidity like coins did.
We eventually got BLUR and lookrare incentivizing pools and even had sudoswap but the problem remained. These liquidity models also don't work *without* incentives from the protocols offering their own tokens.
Previously, You could only ever participate in these projects with 1 WHOLE token and that locked out 99% of participants.
Why is this a big deal? It's what this standard allows to power.
Indulge me for a second here. Imagine Having a fully-fledged "ecosystem" with generated PFPs design that can change with every time you go below a full number to "rarity" trade? If you don't like a design, just sell a fraction below 1 and rebuy to make yourself whole for a completely new design. The projects themselves can set up a liquidity pool on which they earn fees, while also having the ability to earn royalties via secondary markets. You can also take part in this ecosystem regardless of size as you no longer need to whole a full token and speculation-based markets also become easier.
Hell, think native on-chain NFT indexes. In crypto, the "keyest" of concepts and the King is liquidity. Regardless of what your size is, liquidity matters the most here and unlocking "native liquidity" is a huge deal.
Not only would this mean more volume for the "liquid providers" as this is done in a pool but then the community aesthetic would take over and eventually you'll only have pieces that were CURATED by the community. It's a co-creation which hasn't existed as of yet, with the community being the final "minters" while the "creator" gives you the playground.
When I was working as an innovation lead, "NFT-Fi" was a vertical which had a lot of enthusiasm behind it yet one of the hardest to develop because of the ways NFTs exist in their current state. Compared to what the entire value on NFT-Fi is vs when 404s is a mainly adopted standard, a 100x from the current value in the industry is not just a moonshot target, it becomes inevitable.
To make them work with the current methods of liquidity, be smart contract composable and easy to understand & use was a herculean task.
Unless the NFT collection was "blue chip" (through incentivised liquidity), it was an impossible task to make this work across *all* NFT collections in the way that Coins/tokens can.
404s solve this and power a whole lot more.
If I had to use an example of a similar "step up" in crypto terms, it would be akin to the creation of Uniswap and AMMs in a time when ICOs were the norm.
Think MAKER, AAVE, SNX, CURVE and all those DeFi protocol giants entering a space fully encompassing the power of the space and it allowed people to think and develop something even bigger. That's what I see 404s as, an extremely crypto-native concept which can be scaled in terms of UI/UX allowing products to be made that previously have been impossible or needed a lot of "band-aid" assumptions & fixes.
We already have a couple of collections that are gunning for a very 404 future, one of which is @asterixlabs (by @optimizoor) which understands what the standard can power and what we're seeing right now in my honest opinion is the first wave of "Hashmasks" and "Bored Apes" from 2021 being designed and eventually shipped in the coming months.
A shitcoin and NFT packed into ONE native standard in an industry that thrives on trading, speculation and moon-ability?
One "niche" I can see taking off in this standard is also "404 Migration" which would make old collections a second life by converting their existing NFTs into 404s through a token transformation which would mint an "exact" copy of your NFT in 404 while burning the old token. It would most likely manage to keep its "metadata" through a system like colour trace which @LayerZero_Labs dropped a paper on a couple of months ago: https://layerzero.network/publications/ColorTrace.pdf…
TBH, this would also allow for all 404 collections to also be cross-chain compatible but now im really getting ahead of myself.
Basically, 404s are nutty and most likely going to be the standard that powers this entire new cycle.
We're not going to get another NFT cycle that was like the last one using the same standards and "metas", it simply won't. New cycle, new toys, new iterations and new innovations. Anyway, if I'm wrong I'll just delete this, so there is that
TL;DR: Just read it, dude. This may help you out over a longer period.
Also, if any one of you are going to make a 404-centric collection or ecosystem, DM me. I'd love to be involved and have a metric tonne of ideas that would be interesting to explore and build. One area which I don't lack in.
If you do build something based of this, also let me know. It'd be cool to see what comes out of this in the upcoming weeks/months/year.
