My colleague Nikhil has a great post up on the USV blog about NFTs and why they are here to stay.
I particularly like this graph that shows how monthly unique minters has grown steadily throughout the crypto winter even as volumes have declined massively.
It is a classic hype cycle where the bubble bursts but the underlying thing just keeps growing. One day we wake up and the market that almost everyone has given up on is not just alive but stronger than ever.
I also very much like this from Nikhil:
The net result of these improvements is that the aperture of what NFTs can practically represent is opening quickly and interacting with NFTs is becoming ever cheaper and easier. We now have the tools to, in many cases, abstract the technology altogether and have users engage with digital experiences that are silently backed by NFTs. Art and collectibles are just a piece of the puzzle, and any digital artifact in our lives can – and possibly eventually will – be represented by an NFT.
USV has been investing in NFTs and NFT-related technologies, projects, and companies since 2017 and we never stopped, wavered, or flinched. Nikhil's post starts with something I wrote back in 2017 and believe even more strongly today:
We think digital collectibles are one of many amazing things that blockchains enable that literally could not be done before this technology emerged.
Most everyone thinks NFTs are images of silly apes, something to laugh at, but yet the reality is they are the atomic unit of digital ownership in the 21st century. Once again, the thing that we laughed at turns out to be the big thing.
