NFTs Need To Go Green for Mass Adoption aka Everybody Hates NFTs
When during NFT NYC 2022, an apparent protest against NFTs was staged NOBODY was surprised.
Everyone bought into when in reality it was a successful guerrilla marketing strategy by Adam Bomb Squad, that ended up, in a veryNFTesque fashion, being used as the foundation of the instantly sold-out and successful collection GodHatesNFTees.
A collection that was made without the campaign creator’s authorization, because why not.
What is telling about this convoluted situation is how, although it was a marketing campaign, it was so successful because it was believable. Everybody in NFTs, either by working in the field or by being a simple holder, knows this truth: A great number of people have a knee-jerk reaction to the word NFTs: hatred!
Not only do many people hate NFTs, but they’re also VERY outspoken about their hatred. Outspoken and angered to the point of having countless brands, companies, artists, NGOs,… abandoned their NFT collection.
If they didn’t cancel their NFT collection, they had 3.2.1… before being canceled themselves.
Here’s the perfect tweet to sum up this never-ending scenario:
This is such a common recurrence, that we’ve lost track of how many NFT projects died of such death.
As a part of our job is to build an NFT collection alongside our clients, you can guess why this subject is of so much importance to us, and why we wanted to tackle it today!
So, let’s start by addressing the why.
Why do most people hate “NFTees”?
“Because NFTs are the ban of mother earth’s existence. As a Brand, an artist,.. you’re choosing to put a profit and make money, you could make otherwise, by sacrificing Nature. You basically have no morals.”
This is the perception of a majority of people when you tell them you’re going to launch an NFT collection, and it’s why it could be so damaging to a brand’s reputation and could even diminish their audience.
And maybe 10 years ago, or even before the Big C came in the glorious year of 2020 to change our lives forever, the environmentally damaging aspects of NFTs would not have so much impact on its perception, and consequently adoption.
But we’re in 2022 and we’re living in a new paradigm.
To the point, even NFTs’ actors can sometimes suffer from cognitive dissonance due to it.
NFT supporters tweet endlessly “ How would you convince your friend NFTs are not destroying the planet?” , the real question to ask is:
In 2022, are NFTs still so damaging to our one and only planet?
There is no simple answer to this question. It’s actually quite complex.NFTs are not a monolithic block. There isn’t one type of NFT. Every NFT differs based on its blockchain: Ethereum, BNB, Polygon, Solana,…
- Each blockchain has different energy consumption. Some are excessively greedy, some are almost imperceptible:
While Ethereum NFTs are extremely harmful to our ecosystem, Solana and Tezos NFTs apparently consume little more energy than a Google search.
You’re probably thinking TADA! We have the answer to our problem, NFTs have only to be from Solana or Tezos and mass adoption will happen in a blink.
Sorry no.
I did say it was complex!
2. The 3 main “eco-friendly” blockchains have issues of their own that are stopping their NFTs from becoming the biggets players in the NFT ‘s landscape. And these elements weigh heavily in the choices made by NFT collection creators and artists.
Polygon, the player with as much advantages as issues
Polygon has really succeeded in selling themselves as the eco-friendly blockchain to be on for brands (Prada, Bentley, Dolce&Gabbana,…). Apparently, they all got the same memo: “Go On Polygon, Dodge The Cancel Bullet”. Hence, you could expect Polygon, cheap of use, eco-friendly, and having these prestigious brands as trailblazers to become very quickly the dominant NFT player, but it’s not the case.
Although on paper it has everything working for it, the Polygon blockchain carries a lot of negative stigmas, some justified some not, that are impacting greatly its ability to scale.
The first one is its unreliability.
Polygon has made a hobby of crashing over and over again. There is probably a bet made somewhere in the world about Polygon’s next crash. Not only is the blockchain quite chaotic, its currency the MATIC is very volatile. Like every other cryptocurrency, yes, but a bit more so, because it’s less trust than for example Ethereum, so it is subjected to more volatility.
As an NFT collection creator or artist, who wants to have their NFTs on an untrustworthy blockchain whose currency’s high volatility could be quite impactful on your revenue?
The second one is “If it’s on Polygon, it has low or no value”.
Either due to its unreliability or because it’s “free” to mint on it, probably the two combined, instead of becoming the promised land for artists and little actors, Polygon has turned into a conundrum.
It’s very simple really, for the same art piece a 1/1 artist that chooses to sell on Polygon will have a difficult time doing so while he could have an instant sale on Ethereum.
Polygon NFTs, especially the ones created by artists, are considered less, much less valuable than Ethereum NFTs. Artists don’t have much choice, either they sell it at a cheap price on Polygon or they switch to Ethereum.
These negative stigmas that burden Polygon are a hindrance to its mass adoption by NFT actors. Big brands are but a drop in the NFT Ocean, even if they helped improve Polygon’s reputability, it’s not enough for breaking Polygon from its chains.
3 information that could tip the scale one way or another for Polygon
- Polygon is not that eco-friendly apparently
The true energy cost of a Polygon transaction is 2,100 times more than the one originally claimed. The real energetic impact of a single transaction on Polygon is not 0.207 but close to 430 grams of CO2.
It has nipped in the bud WWF NFT Project that had to track back and cancel their collection when this information was disclosed.
This could turn into a cautionary tale for other companies making them turn their back to Polygon and choose Solana or Tezos instead.
2. MATIC is mooning since Disney has picked them for their 2022 Accelerator Program
MATIC has been currently painted as the next crypto juggernaut since Disney’s announcement. This fact alone says more about the deadly winter crypto is going through than Polygon potential. In an extreme bear market that turned crypto space into doom land, any good news tends to 10X cryptocurrencies, MATIC jump is little more than a sign of market extreme volatility. And as high as it has jumped for such little news, it can crash back as easily for as little as what caused its rise.
3. Polygon’s reputation strengthens with the launch of their zkEVM scaling solution
Polygon launching, on July 20th, their zkEVM Scaling Solution for Web3 Adoption that would supposedly solve the underlying blockchain trilemma: decentralization, scalability, and security, has also gone a long way in solidifying Polygon has an actor of value that has much potential to become a Web3 key player.
These two events have improved Polygon’s overall credibility, and this could have for effect to raise its perceived value and in turn, break the stigma that Polygon NFTs hold little to no value.
Only time will tell.
SOLANA ’s self-proclaimed “ Ethereum Killer” has yet to do any killing
Solana shares with Polygon a love for unreliability not to the same degree but still, with, unsurprisingly, the same consequences.
Contrary to Polygon though, Solana NFTs are not perceived as valueless tokens. But they are faced with another issue: Solana NFTs carry quite a bit of a reputation, the scammy type.
Solana NFTs are created by plenty of artists and beautiful and legit projects are plentiful too. But as we talked here before, in NFT land, scams are legion. And Solana seems to attract a fair share of it. At least, it’s perceived to be so. But as we’ve previously discussed here:
,trust, building it, and keeping it is the most strategic part of an NFT collection, that can make or break it. Consequently choosing to build on Solana can be perceived as a risk for the collection’s reputation, because launching an NFT Collection on Solana tends to raise suspicion. A risk that a certain number of NFT creators refuse to take. So although a certain number of them could have taken the Solana route, and would have wanted to, they will choose to take the “safe road”: Ethereum.
The “good” news is that since Solana NFTS are on Opensea they’re going through what some call the “Solana Summer”, apparently Solana Golden Era has come, and a look at Opensea Top Selling Chart would tend to confirm that. The one good thing that came out of it, is that Solana NFTs are now being perceived almost like any other NFTs, and have an enhanced legitimacy.
That being said, habits and stigmas are hard to kill, even if there is a shift in a good direction, the core issues of the Solana Blockchain are yet to be resolved and no mass exodus either by artists or NFT collection creators towards Solana has happened for now.
TEZOS, the blockchain that should have dominated NFTs
Tezos is a bit of a UFO. Out of the three, it’s the one that is the least popular but the least problematic too.
When we present the different blockchains to our clients, and it’s time to present Tezos, we always start with “ Tezos is a great blockchain!”. Because really it is. It was thought and designed to be an eco-friendly Blockchain, it’s reliable, and Tezos currency doesn’t suffer from high volatility.
All in all, out of the 3, it’s the better choice.
But always comes the moment when we’ve to say “ But”.
And this ”but” explains the little adoption of Tezos by NFT’s actors.
Here are our two main hypotheses:
Probably the main issue of Tezos NFTs is the secondary market or lack thereof.
The beating heart of the NFT market is secondary sales. And although you can buy Tezos NFTs on Rarible or Objkt, not only Tezos does not have a diverse pool of marketplaces made for the Tezos blockchain like Solana has, that lead ultimately to the emergence of Solana NFT’s biggest game changer: Magic Eden.
But it’s not on Opensea either, and nothing can probably make or break NFTs like being on Opensea or not being on it. You just have to look at Polygon and “Solana Summer”.
If you have a very low volume ability to sell on the secondary market, you lose a critical argument against your “rivals”. Because this equates to losing money, and a lot of it.
And there is no deterrent as powerful as that. So this seems to play a huge part in Tezos not being able to lure over NFT creators.
Tezos’ currency being pretty stable is an advantage and a disadvantage.
Although Tezos being a pretty stable coin,- subjected to market trends like any other, but staying solid all the same-, could be a very compelling argument,- and it sure is for a lot of people choosing Tezos NFTs-, it could also be as much of an uncompelling argument.
As reassuring as a coin like Tezos can be in the middle of a crypto winter, during the bullish market that saw the emergence and explosion of NFTS, Tezos was just not sexy. There are a lot of parameters that are taken into account when choosing your blockchain and the most important one for a lot of people is making money, a lot of it. In NFTs, one way of doing so is obviously by primary and secondary sales, the other one is more subtle, a kind of passive income through the beautiful and plentiful growth of your chosen blockchain currency. The assumption and perception are that you will be able to make more money by choosing Ethereum, which will grow in value over time,-during a bullish market-, a bit like if you staked your currency on Binance without APY but just with time playing in your favor.
Although it can appear to you as making little sense: who is stopping an artist from converting their Tezos to Ethereum on an exchange? It does make sense from a psychological point of view: you’re adding steps to the process, and there is nothing human beings like less than making what could be perceived as useless, time-consuming, extra steps. Especially because a certain number of NFT sellers have the habit of letting their currency sit on their hot wallets (at best their cold ones), because it’s easy and for (mainly) tax reasons too. Depending on the law in your country and if you used an exchange with KYC, itcould be problematic for some and they will not want to use an exchange unless it’s absolutely necessary: they need fiat, staking,…
These are consequent hindrances to Tezos finding its audience, and you can even add to that Tezos not being on Metamask. Yet, Metamask is the go-to hot wallet for newcomers, meaning a buyer often has to take the extra step of setting up a new hot wallet just to make a Tezos NFT purchase.
That’s why Tezos, although superior as a blockchain, is lagging behind Polygon and Solana.
What could probably change the course of Tezos’ NFT destiny is Opensea. There have been talks and some announcements, but as of now nothing yet.
Even though a Tezos Summer seems a little too far-fetched as they’re on a very different level volume-wise with pre-opensea Solana, a beautiful Tezos Spring could be hoped for.
Ethereum will keep on reigning as King so everyone will keep on hating NFTs, for now
Although green and eco-friendly alternatives exist for NFTs, they’re crushed under Ethereum NFT’s weight, and although we’re all waiting for the merge, expected to slash Ethereum’s power consumption by 99.95 % like the Messiah, it has yet to come.
So, as of now, even when brands, NGOs, .. choose the green path, they’re met with great resistance.
Because, even if NFTs are not a monolithic block, they’re perceived as such. And if a huge part of this block is a disaster for our planet, buying an NFT, even if it’s a ”clean one” is understood as being an active participant in NFTs as a whole becoming a successful industry. Thus participating and cautioning a system that predominantly destroys our planet.
In these given circumstances, you could talk all day long about how incredible and ground-breaking NFTs are for our future, you will be inaudible.
You will never convince anyone of NFT’s value with an Earth-large-sized hurdle in front of you.
I mean you’re destroying the planet, good luck talking to them about intangible utilities!
And that is why mass adoption will not happen before NFTs become predominantly a low ecological footprint space.
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We specialize on blockchain technologies to make your project come to life and cybersecurity to completely secure your web3 journey: from building Smart Contracts, Audit, Minting website, Dapps, Discord Audit and Securing,… to Security Breaches Investigation and Managment!
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