NFTs have gone from confusion and selling for thousands of dollars to people asking, now what? Now NFTs have to come with some kind of value, or as we in space call it, “utility”.

If you create an NFT, it has to have some kind of perk or action besides just existing. That’s what I demonstrated during my talk. You can watch it on YouTube.

Check out the infographic to mint the show notes!

This is my first time minting an NFT on Mirror. I set the network to Optimism. So hopefully the price is reasonable. Let me know how it goes!

https://opensea.io/assets/ethereum/0x5ac1607dD033Ddb37D5BE9995c372510DD34F916/0

I signed up for Greg Younger’s Write3 Challenge. It’s all about using Mirror and writing NFTs for 30 days. Greg has it set up really cool where to join the challenge, you collected an NFT from his site (Write3.io). The NFT gave you access to the Discord challenge server. You only had to pay the gas fee for the NFT. Well, the gas fee was in Polygon’s Matic. It was only a couple of cents but I only had ETH.

I bought some Matic but somehow screwed up that it’s still on the ETH blockchain, not the Polygon one. I tried to do a transfer but it cost more in gas fees to transfer than I originally bought in Matic. Thankfully, someone was nice enough to gift me the cents in Matic I needed to get the Write3 Challenge NFT.

The first part of the Write3 Challenge is to collect another person’s work on Mirror. Well, Mirror is now on Optimism, which I don’t have any of. So I went to do another transfer.

I wanted to collect this post by Cryptoversal. It’s free to collect but you still have to pay the gas fee. Ok, I’m down. So I go to bridge some ETH to Optimism. Does this make sense to anyone?

From Ethereum Mainnet to Optimism. But I’ll receive .001 ETH? Balance ETH to ETH but they’re on different chains? Am I doing this right?

Apparently, it doesn’t matter because even though the Gas fee to transfer is $0, I have insufficient funds. Ok, we solved that problem at least.

By now, I’m too worn out to trust myself to buy some Optimism ETH and have it correctly go to my wallet. So much work to collect a piece of free work. Looking at the clock, I spent at least 30 minutes trying to figure this out.

And to whoever works on the UX for these bridge sites, can we make it less confusing? How are we supposed to trust ourselves when everything has the same name? Maybe platforms like Mirror need to help a gal out with building the bridge into it. Or maybe bridging should be built into our wallets. Why does it cost a gas fee to bridge? This must be more like a foreign exchange than cash to credit.

So, if you’d like me to collect your work, please consider collecting this piece for a price so I can afford to collect yours!

Photo by Ricardo Díaz on Unsplash

Welcome aboard the hype train

The year is 2022. Any time a company does something like hire a virtual influencer, release an NFT, or open a virtual world, the media goes nuts. Nike is entering the metaverse. JP Morgan is entering the metaverse. Everyone is in the metaverse right now – why aren’t you??

This isn’t too different from the 1980s when everyone from Purina dog food to electronic companies entered the market. Eventually, too many poor-quality video games (1982 is when E.T., the worst video game of all time, was released on Atari) led to the video game crash of 1983. What led these companies to rush to market? Dunhill electronics didn’t understand the market. Chase the Chuck Wagon didn’t belong.

After the video game crash, only one company remained: Nintendo. By 1990 Nintendo sold nearly 30 million consoles. One in three households owned a Nintendo, and video games became a $5 billion industry (and they gained 90% of the market). Nintendo focused on family-friendly, quality games. But their business practices weren’t so friendly. They created “lockout” chips to keep non-Nintendo developers from reverse engineering their games. They had contracts with developers that their games could only be published on Nintendo. Developers had to make a certain number of games too.

This is kind of similar today. There are lots of experiences, but they can’t talk to each other easily.

Now, virtual reality is part of the larger metaverse ecosystem. But from 2016 to 2020, virtual reality went through a bipolar market. We started out with multiple consumer VR headsets like Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Microsoft mixed reality headsets. There were “mobile VR” headsets like Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard.

Every year articles would appear, Is the end of VR? VR is Dead. And The year the lights went out for virtual reality. In a similar fashion to Nintendo, one company emerged in consumer VR – Meta with the Meta Quest. However, Developers complain about the Oculus store and the lack of support for Indie VR games. Developers wonder how to get published on Oculus or if it’s worth it since the store takes a 30% cut.

At Metaverse 2.0, Tom Emrich, CEO of The 8th Wall, said, “This year will be the peak hype cycle. Right now, the metaverse is more a mirage than a miracle. The more we get into this, the more we’re going to realize that there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done.”

In order to understand what’s happening, I find it helpful to look at Gartner’s technology hype cycle graph. The metaverse is difficult to put on the graph since it’s a convergence of many different technologies (AI, AR/VR, 5G, blockchain). But the convergence is happening, which I believe puts the metaverse on the Trigger Technology part of the graph.

If Emrich believes 2022 will be the peak hype cycle, that means we’re headed toward the Trough of Disillusionment – and possibly a metaverse crash…

Looking for more?

Check out this talk about Goals, Rules, and Feedback Loops in the metaverse.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed this post, make sure to collect it and subscribe.

I am excited to be here as a writer and, Web3 enthusiast, explorer of worlds. Ok, that’s a little out there, but we’re all here to have fun, right?

I’m here to write a book. And you guessed it. The book is about my journey into the metaverse. I thought, what better way to keep writing it than by posting snippets on a Web3 writing platform?

There are already many books about the metaverse you can read. But the thing that makes Not Another Metaverse Book (working title) unique is the stories, opinions, and analysis of what’s important.

The benefits of collecting these chapter snippets? It means you’re part of something special. You’re the first to read and have input on this goal of mine. This project is half challenge to see if I can write 40,000 or so words on a topic and half mission to educate people on new technology.

Next Steps

1. Release a chapter snippet

2. Connect my Discord

3. Create a way for collection holders to give feedback/add quotes to the book/??

Is that how this works? Let me know!

P.S. Thanks to Greg Younger for introducing me to Web3 writing. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

Subscribe and collect the post.

Read more at Lilyotron.blog