Alex Gedevani
The NFT landscape is rapidly evolving and a byproduct of this is further fragmentation. This raises the question of how products are positioning themselves to serve users’ needs and how users are dividing their time amongst these products.
The answer all boils down to attention. How do we best contextualize where attention, the most valuable commodity, of the typical NFT user lies?
My mental model is simple. Think of every NFT related product you’ve used in the past 6 months. Chances are most of them fall under and serve at least one of the four attention buckets in the below graphic.
We all either a) consume information (information layer) or b) take action whether that is with financial or non-financial intent (action layer).
Let’s call “NFT Godmode” the north star, a point in time where all users’ needs are sufficiently met by products serving these four attention modes. We are not there yet.
How close are we to achieving NFT Godmode and how are products positioning today across these attention buckets? Let’s dive in below.
Have you ever curated your NFTs on Gallery or OnCyber? Created UGC based off your NFTs in a community like Storyverse? Products under the “passive” actions group often give users things to do after the NFT collection process and are predominantly non-speculative.
Active actions are centered around financial intent. Most products in this attention mode focus on improving the trading experience or leveraging NFTs in productive ways (See NFTfi).
Wherever attention goes, liquidity flows. Speculation is still the biggest use case of crypto by a landslide. It’s no surprise that this quadrant dominates in terms of attention, revenue generated, and number of teams building within it. Look no further than Opensea whose breakout success has led to fierce competition for a slice of the NFT volumes pie. Even in a bear market, Opensea is 2nd after Ethereum in revenue with $391m over the past year.
The “push” layer, or information layer comes into play often times after the action layer. Products building here often focus across two key pillars: saving users time and money.
You’ve bought assets but now need a level of personalization around information pertaining to your existing assets. Otherwise you will struggle with a firehouse of fragmented information. I’m not the only who’s having trouble tracking information across twitter, discords, telegrams and newsletters. People are forgetting free claims, whitelist entries, proposals and much more.
A great example of a product catered towards personalization is Daylight. Think of Daylight as a personal assistant whose sole job is telling you what pending actions you can take with your NFTs.
LuckyTrader can be setup to deliver personalized news and markets information pertaining to the assets in your wallet. It is your context layer and keeps you informed.
Another big problem today is the lack of discoverability and curation in the space. Users often run into issues when it comes to a) finding new products to try, b) discovering what others are getting into, and c) keeping up with what’s trending.
Sites like DappRadar and Dapp List are trying to tackle the app discovery angle. Products like Context and Soho are keying in on wallet tracking which can surface new insights. There is progress in this quadrant but perhaps a web3 native search platform can further move things along. In an ideal world, we see more projects like Ora Labs pushing along natural language search for web3 data while also leaning into app discovery based off this data (“Show me the top 5 most used blockchain games in the sports category in the past 7 days on Ethereum”)
Unlike “push”, this layer is less about tailor-made news flow around existing apps one may use and more towards nudging the user towards the next set of products or trends they can pull themselves into. There does not yet exist a comprehensive solution for this. If this section interests you, you can read more in my prior note So you got a new wallet, now what? .
Products that try to service all four modes simultaneously likely struggle in a losing effort as specialized competitors provide more value. Better to start in one mode and expand
Certain quadrants are synergistic. “Active” products like marketplaces can slowly integrate the information layer to grow the pie faster
The timing of the user journey in NFTs if depicted by quadrants would be as follows 1) Pull 2) Active with Push and Passive interchangeable at 3) and 4)
The least developed quadrants today (Pull and Push) likely fall under the information layer. Most products are focused on action rather than information, leading to fragmentation in the space.
“Pull” mode, is a largely untapped opportunity and sits at the top of the funnel for new user acquisition. It is the key to growing the tam of all the other buckets.
Monetization in “Active” is quite easy as a function of take rate based on economic activity whereas others are still being sorted out (pay for personalization, etc)
What quadrant excites you the most? Building anything interesting across one of them? Happy to chat and dms are open.
