MAY 18TH, 2020

It’s no secret that impassioned communities surround blockchain projects. Investing in cryptocurrency requires both an investment of time and money, and the time required to learn about projects leads to an emotional investment as well. Conviction in a specific cryptocurrency can sometimes lead to huge payouts which foster loyalty.

100,000% gains that happen in the cryptosphere have led to years of infighting on the internet. Cryptocurrency marketing focuses on how a project’s technology will be the first to attract developers that drive mainstream users. Crypto’s “killer app” has been endlessly debated for millions of hours between thousands of currencies, but NFTs may be the first iteration of a truly useful crypto product for consumers.

As mainstream brands use the different options for creating NFTs - NBA on FLOW, Funko on WAX, artists on ETH - we’re seeing a new kind of cryptocurrency investor that rises above the infighting - “NFT collector”. NFT collectors must learn to navigate a plethora of marketplaces, wallets, dApps, and different user interfaces that have all achieved different levels of functionality and all have their own pros and cons. 

'Our Blessed Homeland' (my cartoon for yesterday's @guardianreview) - pic.twitter.com/EliUnCOpIZ

— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) March 1, 2015

In order to help each other navigate all this, a community of these collectors has sprung alive over the last 4 years. The NFT collector community is not just on Ethereum, or Wax. It’s on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord. Collectors discuss the best options to get different currencies or invites to new marketplaces. The fights about who has the best technology aren’t as important when people are chasing the underlying assets to buy the things they want on these marketplaces. Healthier communities are formed as the financial objectives are more easily aligned, and alliances are more easily formed when everyone can benefit from clear collaboration.

For anyone attempting to catch the wave of this new NFT paradigm, it is best to be blockchain agnostic. Take our very own CryptoFinney project, for example. We thought it best to acknowledge our roots in the EOS community, while also facing the reality that most users have been introduced to AtomicHub through WAX. The best collectors of Finneys will be those that can leverage both the EOS and WAX sides of our project.

OG Ethereum NFT collectors have begun to discover this phenomenon, as Pranksy and Beanie.eth are now both major collectors on WAX.

It’s hard to ignore the traction that WAX is getting with Topps MLB, Alien Worlds, R Planet and other launches. I’m playing this the smart way with a decent position in $WAXP, the currency of the ecosystem. FLOW fully diluted market cap is nearly 50x (not a typo) the size of WAX.

— Beanie 🟩 (@beaniemaxi) April 30, 2021

So I think I've inadvertently become the largest @WAX_io #MLB @ToppsDigital card collector in the world... https://t.co/yaGBOLIm3e

nneau.wam reporting for duty!#NFTs #whatdoiwin pic.twitter.com/VGK3Gzw9Ay

— Pranksy 📦 (@pranksy) April 27, 2021

With the options for digital collectors expanding daily, it will be interesting to see how marketplaces like AtomicHub integrate “swap” mechanisms for those cases where one user is selling in WAX, but another is purchasing in EOS. The proficient collector currently needs to use different currencies, wallets, and marketplaces in order to maximize their collecting potential.

I foresee that the first marketplace that utilizes a “globally” connected blockchain or behind-the-scenes liquid swap mechanism to list art and collectibles from across all the different marketplaces will have a clear road to success. For now, the pros and cons of each blockchain and marketplace remain in constant flux, while the communities surrounding them grow stronger than ever.