Is the Culture Coming Back From the Dead?

Is the culture in a revival? Are NFTs nearly back in SZN? X chatter says, hell yes.

Blue-chip NFT sales surged on Monday, with projects like CryptoPunks experiencing their highest valuations of 2024. And, for those running in the right X circles, “NFT Revival” has become a proper web3 buzzword. But why now? It’s hard to say. It’s been several years since the first NFT bull run, and a real utility case for cartoon ape JPEGs has yet to materialize. Yet here we are!

Well, frankly, it couldn’t come at a better time. With the Bitcoin halving months behind us, Solana Breakpoint more than a month out, and one of the biggest news stories of the week being a McDonald’s Instagram rugpull netting $700,000 in SOL for the scammer involved, it’s about time the focus shifted from the pump and dumps of last week and last cycle, to the artists, creators, and communities giving the culture life.

Previously, NFT hype peaked in spring 2021, a cool 10 months post-halving. Of course, as the true degens know, the excitement actually began at the end of DeFi summer, when all the gains from the yield farming schemes were directed into collectible art and profile picture (PFP) based communities. The draw of NFTs — aside from their *ahem* aesthetic appeal — was that these digital assets have built in scarcity, recorded to the chain, with active liquid value in the best of examples.

Now, do I expect to see a fresh cohort of PFP communities spring up this cycle, or even a resurgence of relevancy to old communities like the ETH-based ones mentioned above? No. It’s hard to trust market movement when there’s nothing material behind it.

But, from an immaterial perspective, I sure as shit hope we do. Shameless plug for our growing playrs community — but also for projects like Solana Monkey Business, Mad Lads, and even the acolytes of $MOTHER who deserve some sort of cheeky PFP to go along with their bags.

Above all that, the real reason I want to see the return of PFPs is for the artists. I’ve spent the better part of the past 48 hours working with the National Science Foundation on this very topic: the intersection of art and technology.

How can we better integrate people from these often-opposing disciplines to create stronger teams, better adapted to tackle challenges, with a wider breadth of experience and deeper depth of knowledge?

In academia, particularly in highly technical disciplines like critical materials and biologics supply chains, said breadth and depth are scant. The silo’d perspective of subject matter expertise limits the solution sets from which the team is operating.

Artists, on the other hand, habitually use things for unintended use cases. They ask why things work the way they do, and work to make it work better. It’s this potent combination of curiosity and action, without fearing the failure of experimentation, that sets artists apart from other disciplines. And it’s because of artists we often discover new applications for old technologies, or breakthroughs to the bottlenecks delaying implementation of new theories.

So while it’s fun to have a laugh at NFT buyers, where the use case is often negligible, the utility of NFTs for creators has been consistently proved out. NFTs are a useful tool for getting money directly in the hands of artists, often the ones building the sort of weird, immaterial shit that gets us closer to true global user adoption.

Industry-wide, we’re seeing steps toward “mass adoption” every day — institutional DeFi interest, etc. But while these might get us closer to a parallel banking system, which is theoretically good for said “masses”, it’s also conceptually much less tangible to us than the apps and systems we interact with everyday.

(Or highly-priced pixel art, if it’s more your bag. To thine own self be true.)

—El Prof