On Tuesday, a financial reporter friend texted me to ask if I’d be attending NFT NYC events the next day. “How is it even happening this year when the volume is so low,” she asked. I sent her a spreadsheet that listed 180 different events happening in the next three days all around the city—there was plenty to do.
By Wednesday afternoon, I was standing outside Samsung’s Future+ launch event doing an interview with a radio reporter who asked me whether this year’s event felt like a shell of what it once was, since, after all, NFTs are down bad.
Hey, I get it. After the speculative JPEG-flipping bubble of 2021 popped and overall NFT sales volume plummeted, the mocking stories write themselves. It’s easy to view today’s NFT space as a punchline, especially if you focus on a single brutal data point comparing volume at the peak to volume now. (NFT sales surged to $2 billion in February, by the way, and dipped only slightly below $2 billion in March.)
But if you ask me if the scene is dead, the answer is an emphatic no. NFT NYC events I attended this year had the energy, positivity,…