The Final Chapter and Restart of NFT: Issuing Coin is Not the End

1. The Decline of the NFT Boom

The prosperity of the NFT market seems to have become a thing of the past. The token issuance of Pudgy Penguins marked the last highlight moment for NFTs, while the token issuance of Doodles on Solana only attracted limited attention. Even giants like Yuga Labs are continuously downsizing, and even its iconic IP Cryptopunks has not been spared. The Bitcoin NFT projects that were once in the spotlight during the last wave of NFT revival are now nearly at zero, and the once-exciting narrative has gradually faded from people's sight.

10,000 PFP(Profile Picture) NFT once represented a beautiful vision: a moderately sized community can help a bottom-up IP project go global. This is in stark contrast to traditional IP projects, which require huge financial investments and years of development to resonate with people. The entry barrier for NFTs is extremely low; creators only need to pay a small gas fee to sell their works on NFT platforms, without the need for support from galleries, toy companies, or film studios, giving birth to an IP and a new artist.

Three to four years ago, we witnessed some grassroots IPs rising to fame in the top entertainment circles of Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea. Ordinary artists can also achieve a comeback through NFTs. For Generation Z like me, who grew up watching Japanese anime, being able to participate in IP investment and incubation that was once difficult to access through cryptocurrency is an extremely dreamy thing.

However, with the "nested doll" behavior of BAYC( Bored Ape Yacht Club) and the disastrous sub-series Elemental release by Azuki, the positioning of NFTs is gradually becoming clearer. It is not a form of equity or investment, but rather more like an expensive luxury item with accompanying membership benefits. The project parties hope that holders will continuously purchase sub-series to support their roadmap for building the core value of their subsequent IP. This contradictory seed has thus been sown: the project parties understand that the cost of content creation is high, but without creating content IP, survival becomes difficult. Releasing sub-series every few months continuously consumes the enthusiasm of the original series holders, tormenting every member of the community. Waiting for the returns from content may take years, or it may never arrive. The cracks begin to widen, beautiful fantasies shatter as the floor price drops, leaving only various controversies and disputes.

2. The Ace MCN in the Trendy Toy Industry: PoP MART

If NFTs are viewed as luxury trendy toys for Generation Z, the reasons for their rise and fall become clearer. In this fast-paced era, the lack of content support is not necessarily a bad thing, as buyers can be attracted quickly just by appearance. For example, Azuki's art style is very in line with Asian aesthetics, and under this consensus, this grassroots-produced NFT series can also become the third-largest blue chip after BAYC. Well-known trendy toys in the real world, such as Bearbrick(, the B.Duck little yellow duck, and Molly, also do not have deep content support, but all became popular due to their unique appearance.

However, trends are always changing rapidly. Without content as the core value, these IPs may become outdated at any time. Limited by the culture of the cryptocurrency circle and the extremely low success rate of NFT projects, project teams often launch derivatives around an IP. But the reality is that before the core has taken shape, this wave of enthusiasm has already faded.

Of course, there are also some PFP projects with rich content support, such as Japanese NFTs. In the past, I have encountered at least four or five projects with well-known Japanese manga IPs, all hoping to make a big splash in the NFT market. However, they seem to overlook several key issues: first, the fan base of the IP is almost completely different from the NFT community; second, there are already a plethora of Japanese anime peripheral products, why would fans spend hundreds of times the price to buy a small image? Most importantly, this small image is just an image, and the potential for future empowerment is almost zero. Even if you purchase a Gundam NFT, you can only gain access to the "SIDE-G" gateway of the Gundam metaverse. The profits that Bandai Namco earns from models, games, and animations are naturally irrelevant to you, and the NFT community may even be seen as an outsider among the entire Gundam fanbase. This issue also exists in the GameFi sector.

At this point, PFP projects have become a false proposition, with only the pragmatic project of the little penguin still making continuous efforts. So, do these small images really have any other way out? I believe PoP MART may offer a different answer.

This small box store originating from the Beijing Euro-America Shopping Center turned its fortunes around by代理Sonny Angel. This single series contributed nearly 30% of PoP MART's sales at the time. The envious copyright holder reclaimed the exclusive agency rights a year later, but this move instead led to the birth of an IP empire.

The founder of PoP MART, Wang Ning, had a very simple idea at the time: to create proprietary IP that cannot be taken away by others. In 2016, PoP MART collaborated with Hong Kong designer Wang Xinming to launch the first self-owned trendy toy series, Molly. This little girl with a pouting expression quickly became popular nationwide. Through the uncertainty of the blind box play and the dopamine drive, PoP MART began its first round of rocket-like growth. By 2019, the annual sales of the single IP Molly had reached 456 million yuan, becoming the core source of income for PoP MART.

This model, which combines Japanese gashapon with high-end trendy toys, has also become quite common in the NFT craze in the following years. Basic elements are designed by artists, and then assembled into a series of images for sale and operation by the project team. NFTs usually adopt a blind box format during the initial launch phase, and the project team will release various rare combinations of images to stimulate players' purchasing desire.

The two only differ in the way they are issued, but tens of thousands of NFT projects have generally failed along with various blue-chip ones. So why is PoP MART experiencing a second spring now?

I once attributed the reasons to the difficulties in landing and the high purchasing thresholds. The former indeed has problems at present, while the latter is not necessarily true. NFTs also went through a Free Mint period with projects like Goblintown and MIMIC SHHANS being the stars of that time, where creators made a fortune just from transaction fees. Many NFTs in the inscription era are even more decentralized based on this, but these factors still cannot prevent the decline of NFTs. Forming or joining an IP community is very simple; the difficult part is how to sustain it.

Therefore, I think the problem may lie in the model. After the first round of rapid growth, Molly did not make PoP MART famous overnight; the company's stock price, like NFTs, fell all the way from 2021 to 2024. However, PoP MART ultimately achieved a turnaround, relying on a whole wall of IPs. Now, PoP MART owns 12 proprietary IPs including Molly, DIMOO, BOBO&COCO, YUKI, and Hirono, 25 exclusive IPs including THE MONSTERS) with Labubu(, PUCKY, and SATYR RORY, as well as over 50 non-exclusive co-branded IPs with Harry Potter, Disney, League of Legends, and more.

People's preferences are always unpredictable, and the lifecycle of an IP is limited, but what if there are hundreds of choices at hand? Nowadays, Labubu has become a sensation in Europe, America, and Southeast Asia, and the value retention ability of its surrounding dolls can be called "plastic Moutai." Yuga Labs' ideals have ultimately been realized in the Web2 domain, and all of this is not a coincidence.

We need to rethink what the IP business is, what the development roadmap for NFTs is, and why PoP MART can achieve such high success without content support?

III. The Path to Success of Pudgy Penguins

Last year, I also participated in the event held by Little Penguin in Hong Kong, and this NFT project has always maintained enthusiasm towards the community.

The key to the success of Pudgy Penguins lies in being pragmatic, pragmatic, and still pragmatic. The NFT itself is difficult to create a technological gap, no matter how cleverly the Mint process is designed, it ultimately remains a JPG image. The real challenge facing NFTs is the realization of IP, which is hundreds of times more difficult than producing 10K PFPs. Yuga Labs wants to build a metaverse, while Azuki hopes to create anime. These ideas are cool, but these projects, which start at over 100 million in costs, will ultimately seek funding support from community members.

In this highly compressed world, everyone is eager to achieve quick success. Holders want to make a lot of money, while project teams want to reach the top in one step. Very few blue-chip projects are willing to humble themselves, and the more impatient they are, the harder they fall. The original team of Pudgy Penguins was also an impatient grassroots team; after their reputation was damaged, they sold the little penguin project at a low price.

At this moment, the little penguin met the real talent scout, Luca Netz. This practitioner with years of experience in physical marketing brought the little penguin back to its rightful height. Luca Netz is indeed building a brand and operating a company for NFT holders. From marketing to plush toys to future games, every step of the little penguin is solid and steady, allowing the company to be profitable and the holders to gain profits. There is nothing particularly special about this; it is just doing what should be done. It has been proven that bottom-up IP can exist in Web3; it is just that there are too few project parties willing to lower their stance.

Therefore, I really dislike the term "falsification", as if certain things should not have existed from the very beginning. Electric vehicles used to seem silly, and Siri on my phone used to be quite dumb as well. But this does not prevent entire cities today from being filled with new energy vehicles, and the development of AI goes without saying.

Many so-called debunked tracks, Web3 will still try in the future, but it lacks a suitable project party.

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4. Future Development Path

The path to success seems simple, but in reality, it is fraught with difficulties. The next phase of PFP's development must break through the inherent logical framework of the cryptocurrency circle; to become the next Web3 version of Disney requires substantial accumulation. I have previously discussed whether the scarcity of NFTs has been counterproductive in the process of becoming more mainstream. If NFTs are defined as trendy consumer goods, then the limitation of 10,000 NFTs may be too great; if they are defined as a unique asset and fundraising method of Web3, then IP ultimately needs to be converted into physical consumer goods to fulfill its commitments to the community, rather than a bunch of strange sub-series.

Based on the unique culture of the cryptocurrency circle and the characteristics of NFTs themselves, focusing long-term on a single IP is also a helpless move. How can we innovate based on these PFPs? How can we expand a project into an IP factory? This may require us to embrace some new ideas and introduce more technologies and gameplay.

5. Is issuing a coin the end?

The significance of issuing tokens for NFTs remains unclear to this day. This practice resembles an exploitation of the lower tiers by those in higher positions, and it also dilutes the original value of NFTs. I can only interpret it as the project team seeking an easy way to exit liquidity.

From APE to DOOD, without exception, they all seem to be variants of air coins. Their empowerment usually includes staking to earn on-chain trading dividends, purchasing rights for items in the metaverse, governance rights, and so on. Ideally, it should be a perfect loop among holders, stakers, and developers. But the reality is that it resembles air more, trapped in a vicious cycle of falling NFT prices, declining mining yields, and decreasing token prices.

For original NFT holders, although the tokens have taken away some dividends and rights, most of them will receive a large airdrop during the TGE) token generation event (, so very few people complain. However, in the long run, this is indeed a form of dilution, and the distribution method like Azuki's Anime is even more blatant plunder.

Short-term popularity is certainly important, but the long-term survival of the project is more critical. Do not let the issue coin become the endpoint of the project.

Conclusion

In this fast-paced, dopamine-driven era, we see