 Hi everyone, it's MJ the Fellow Actory and in today's video, we're gonna be talking about NFTs, particularly the statement that NFTs are dead. And I know this is coming about because of the recent crypto crash and the thing about these crashes is they've happened in the past and they're most likely going to to happen again. Whenever there's high expected return you can also expect to have these volatility storms where we go through these periods where there are these shocks in the price, they come down and you know, we could even then enter a bear market for foreseeable, you know, maybe a couple of months before we start seeing the spiking up again. Of course, it's crypto, anything can happen. These bear markets can be very short-lived. We could have prices rebounding or like I say, it could take quite a while for the prices to return. But because of this price crash, some people are saying that the NFTs are dead. Now, what I find interesting about the statement is that it's kind of two statements and in one because when people refer to NFTs or they're referring to the technology, you know, this idea that we can transfer non-fungible assets, you know, between various people and you know, how frictionless this is compared to when we tried doing this in the physical world. And for that case, I don't think NFTs are dead. In fact, this is merely the beginning. And I think anyone who's been in logistics or is part of admin of any sort of financial securities or anything like that, will realize that the technology of transferring of ownership is huge. And we can just see NFTs kind of kind of going through the roof from a technological point of view. It's kind of like saying, oh, someone started selling books and the book stopped selling. Oh, my gosh, it's the end of, you know, the printing press. It's like, no, maybe that one application of it didn't work, but the technology itself is going to push forward. And I like to always do that. I like to always compare NFTs to paper because essentially anything you can do with piece of paper, you can do with an NFT as well, just like how you can create art on paper. You can create a bond on paper, a currency, a contract. You can do all of these other things with the non-fungible technology, except with a piece of paper. If I wanted to send it to you or you want to send it to me, we have to go through this whole elaborate postal system in order to try to get it to one another, each other. Whereas with NFT technology, I mean, my address is mjactry.eth. You could send an NFT straight to that address and I'll get it probably before you finish watching this video. So that type of technology is very, very powerful. And we haven't even scratched the surface on the applications. And your NFTs are going to become embedded in our way of life. But when people say NFTs are dead, they sometimes mean NFTs as how they're seen and used today. And that is mainly the PFP or the Profile Picture Projects. And this is this idea where we have the Board Abe Yacht Club, where these things are selling for for millions of rands, hundreds and thousands of US dollars. And to some people, they seem very, very crazy. You know, why are you spending so much money on a JPEG of a monkey? And oh, this was tulip mania all over again. And of course, you know, this crash was inevitable and profile pictures are dead. And we're going to move on from them. And I'm going to I'm going to maybe take a bit of a contrarian view and say that they're not dead, that the Profile Picture Project idea, again, I would say it's in its infancy and we are going to see it having its role in the future. Especially when you look at how the sociology of the internet is kind of defined. We don't necessarily have a have a religion on the internet, you know, a collective religion, which we sometimes have in our in our physical societies, you know, something to cement, you know, our social, our social structures, establish some sort of hierarchy or provide a collective identity. You know, we don't have that collective or like I say, we don't all buy into the same religion online. Whereas these profile picture projects can kind of do that. If you think about it and, you know, you look at the Twitter interaction, but, you know, amongst various users and you'll see someone with like a board at your club talking down to somebody else, belittling their opinion by saying, oh, you know, come back to me when you've got a profile picture that is, you know, past 100 ETH, you know, being very belittling. But it's this whole thing of, you know, kind of forming a little bit of a hierarchy. And you have this hierarchy between the profile picture projects with, like I say, board at your club and CryptoPunks being at the top, you know, then you've got Moonbirds, World of Women, and, you know, you've got all the other smaller projects coming in there. But even within these profile picture projects, and I think this is one of the reasons for why they've been so successful is because they're non fungible in the sense that each one is unique and different. Some have got traits that are rarer than others or more desirable. So, for instance, sometimes you can have a profile picture where only 2% of them are wearing crowns or only 3% of them are have got blue skin or something like that. And the community then says, well, the rarer these ones are, the more valuable they are. So the people who hold this have more of a, you know, status in the hierarchy. So we're using these profile pictures to almost organize our society on the internet, which of course will lead into that whole metaverse concept as well. But also it's providing people with a collective identity. Again, that's something that religion provides for us here in the physical world. Whereas when you go online, it's kind of like, who are you? You know, people can now say, oh, I'm an ape. They're part of the board at your club or, you know, I'm a this if I'm part of this profile picture. So I think the profile pictures are are still going to stay. I think what's happened is it was very, very easy money or very, very easy to to set up these communities to begin with. You just needed a 10,000 generative art project, a little smart contract, a Discord channel, and you were good to go. And then we had an abundance of supply, a lot of rug pools, a lot of scams, a lot of, you know, communities, promising things and then roadmaps going nowhere. So I think what this crash does is, again, it wipes out all of the bad projects, the projects that weren't actually offering anyone any substantial value. And what we're going to see is when the markets recover. And like I said, that could be soon or that could be in a long, long time. And I'm being vague purposely because, of course, this is one of the trickiest things when it comes to these markets is you don't exactly know the timing. But there will be a return at some stage. And then what we will see is the capital will flow to the projects that are, you know, offering value. So now the profile pictures that it's actually quite interesting to watch them, the ones that are still offering value, the ones that are still building community, the ones that are still hosting events. I think these are the ones that when, you know, the bear market ends, we can expect them to stop performing better. And of course, joining these things, I mean, I bought into only two of them are bought into like a slightly big one and a slightly small one just to kind of, I guess, learn and and see the whole thing. For me, you know, you've got the little, the little blue lime in the background. That's my profile picture on Twitter. And that was a one of one NFT, which I made on Super. And I think as an artist in this space, you know, I come in more as a, how would I say, a little bit, you know, out and against the crowd, but I can definitely see and understand the appeal of being part of a community, having a shared profile picture. I did try it out for a while. It was amazing. You put this thing as your profile picture and then you start getting quite a lot of followers from people with very similar profile pictures to you. So if you want that social interaction, these profile pictures are offering this and you know, people say, oh, what's the utility of an NFT? And it's like, well, that's a utility. It's just quite difficult to, you know, how do you quantify that social interaction? Anyway, maybe going a little bit off topic, but essentially just wanted to make this video, you know, just to say that, you know, our NFT is dead and the answer is no on both fronts. No on the technology dying up. Like I said, I think that's got a bright future, many different applications and also a no, they're not dead in their main application at the moment, which is these profile picture projects. I think that they do have a space specifically on, on Twitter and they might even be more so when, you know, we are seeing Facebook is getting more and more involved in the whole NFT game as, as well. But those are some of my thoughts. Let me know what you think about NFTs in the comment section below. And as always, thanks so much for watching. Cheers.