Although anonymous development is a thing that is in line with the "Web3 spirit" ("don't trust, just verify"), the success of NFT projects cannot be "decentralized" for the following reasons:

If we treat NFTs as works of art, then we must recognize that the underlying artistic creativity is the key to distinguishing humans from machines. Unlike lending/staking in DeFi, which can be implemented through smart contracts, the creation, operation, and transaction of NFTs are highly subjective (and highly speculative), which means that we cannot audit an NFT project like auditing smart contracts (except minting process), which means that we have to "trust" the project team, more or less "trust" the "big pie" drawn by the project team in the roadmap and the quality of the artwork under that blind box. At that time point, the context will not be a trustless environment, so many of the principles of Web3 simply do not apply.

In the context of "trust", if the project team is completely anonymous, then this is a completely asymmetric risk model. Using Taleb's framework, the project team is not "skin in the game" at all, they can enjoy the consequences of the project's successful launch (there will always be people who are willing to mint), but they don't have to bear the negative consequences if they later rug and run. And if the core members of the project are doxxed (or "indirectly doxxed" through the verification of other doxxed influencers), then the project team will have to bear more risks, making the risks of each participating party more balanced.

When I raised this question in a project channel not long ago, someone replied that the reason why the founder was completely anonymous was for the "decentralization" purpose. I was a little bit speechless. If an NFT project could be decentralized, would it still have a successful launch? Can a group of discord fans and speculators come to draw and create NFTs for their own distribution? For some blue-chip projects such as Azuki, imagine if the main creators of these projects were purely anonymous, or if they run away after the luanch, they should not be as popular as they are today. It is true that NFT may be the least web3 product at the current stage, but it may be precisely for this reason that it has entered the public eye of web2 at such a fast speed.

The above is only based on my personal experience, and this is just my own preference for selecting projects. Later, I will also try to put my experience in due diligence and information collection in practice into this field to do some analysis and share it with everyone, hoping that there will be a better NFT market with more high-quality projects. If we also consider NFT as art, there is one sentence that impressed me deeply: science is the gift that the universe has left to people, and art is the gift that people have left to the universe.

Although anonymous development is a thing that is in line with the "Web3 spirit" ("don't trust, just verify"), the success of NFT projects cannot be "decentralized" for the following reasons:

If we treat NFTs as works of art, then we must recognize that the underlying artistic creativity is the key to distinguishing humans from machines. Unlike lending/staking in DeFi, which can be implemented through smart contracts, the creation, operation, and transaction of NFTs are highly subjective (and highly speculative), which means that we cannot audit an NFT project like auditing smart contracts (except minting process), which means that we have to "trust" the project team, more or less "trust" the "big pie" drawn by the project team in the roadmap and the quality of the artwork under that blind box. At that time point, the context will not be a trustless environment, so many of the principles of Web3 simply do not apply.

In the context of "trust", if the project team is completely anonymous, then this is a completely asymmetric risk model. Using Taleb's framework, the project team is not "skin in the game" at all, they can enjoy the consequences of the project's successful launch (there will always be people who are willing to mint), but they don't have to bear the negative consequences if they later rug and run. And if the core members of the project are doxxed (or "indirectly doxxed" through the verification of other doxxed influencers), then the project team will have to bear more risks, making the risks of each participating party more balanced.

When I raised this question in a project channel not long ago, someone replied that the reason why the founder was completely anonymous was for the "decentralization" purpose. I was a little bit speechless. If an NFT project could be decentralized, would it still have a successful launch? Can a group of discord fans and speculators come to draw and create NFTs for their own distribution? For some blue-chip projects such as Azuki, imagine if the main creators of these projects were purely anonymous, or if they run away after the luanch, they should not be as popular as they are today. It is true that NFT may be the least web3 product at the current stage, but it may be precisely for this reason that it has entered the public eye of web2 at such a fast speed.

The above is only based on my personal experience, and this is just my own preference for selecting projects. Later, I will also try to put my experience in due diligence and information collection in practice into this field to do some analysis and share it with everyone, hoping that there will be a better NFT market with more high-quality projects. If we also consider NFT as art, there is one sentence that impressed me deeply: science is the gift that the universe has left to people, and art is the gift that people have left to the universe.