The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create - Hardcover

Kaczynski, Steve; Kominers, Scott Duke

 
9780593545102: The Everything Token: How NFTs and Web3 Will Transform the Way We Buy, Sell, and Create
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593545109 ISBN 13: 9780593545102
Verlag: Portfolio, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A Harvard Business School professor and a16z crypto research partner and a career marketer and Web3 entrepreneur demystify the coming digital revolution, showing how NFTs will transform our online and offline interactions.

NFTs aren’t just pictures on the internet, or a fad that has come and gone. Rather, they're a new technology for creating digital assets and providing irrefutable proof of ownership. NFTs open up markets that have never before existed, and are already revolutionizing commerce and brand-building at everything from hot startups to Fortune 500 companies. 

Kominers and Kaczynski have created a framework that explains what NFTs are, why they’re valuable, and how businesses can leverage them to build highly engaged and intensely loyal communities around their products and brands.

Through original research and industry experience, Kominers and Kaczynski describe the possibilities of this new digital frontier with clarity and rigor. The Everything Token is the essential primer on this innovation that has the potential to transform all aspects of business.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Steve Kaczynski has more than fifteen years of experience as a communications and marketing professional, including stints in leadership at Progressive Insurance and Nestlé. 

Scott Duke Kominers is the Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a partner at a16z crypto. He co-leads Harvard's Crypto, Fintech, and Web3 Lab. 

Both advise entrepreneurs and established companies on NFTs, Web3, and marketplace design, and are avid NFT collectors and creators themselves.

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1

Introduction

Planet of the Apes

In March 2022, one of the then-hottest startup companies on the planet raised $450 million in an oversubscribed investment round valuing the company at $4 billion. Investors were champing at the bit to fund Yuga Labs, a unicorn startup whose premier product was . . . digital pictures of cartoon monkeys!?

The pictures weren't made by a famous artist. In fact, while their individual visual features had been hand-drawn, the images themselves were created by a computer process. An algorithm randomly combined features like fur, clothes, and facial expressions into an image looking something like this:

Popular sites like Quora and Reddit were flooded with people asking versions of "Why would anyone pay real money for a random picture of a monkey?" Some commentators pointed out that the pictures technically weren't of monkeys at all-they were of apes, which are a different kind of primate-but that didn't do much to clarify why anyone would think they might have value.

Even more baffling, in a world where most consumer startups race to acquire as many customers as possible and tout their "total addressable market," Yuga had only created ten thousand of the images, and committed to never produce any more.

The whole premise seemed ridiculous. But even more absurd on its face was that the pictures weren't quite the product at all. Indeed, they were publicly available for anyone to view or download on the internet. What Yuga had really "sold" was just a series of digital records-non-fungible tokens (NFTs)-which associated specific people (or rather, their computer accounts) with specific images in the collection.

That's right: investors put hundreds of millions of dollars into a company that had sold ten thousand digital records linking computer accounts to public primate pictures.

Moreover, while Yuga had created these digital records, it didn't even control them. Unlike the tech platform behemoths that closely guard every bit of their data, Yuga's NFTs were stored on a public decentralized computer network called a blockchain, so once they were created, the NFTs were in effect out of the company's hands. Yuga couldn't control who bought, sold, or traded them-much less the market price. And the public nature of the blockchain meant that wherever the images went was tracked for the whole world to see.

The whole phenomenon left many observers scratching their heads. The images weren't much like the type of art that people often paid millions of dollars for-and again, to the extent that anyone "bought" or "owned" one of these images at all, what they actually got was the digital record, i.e., the associated NFT. People could buy and sell NFTs just as they might trade Pokémon cards or oil futures, but NFTs are otherwise quite different-after all, with futures you eventually own the commodity, and with Pokémon you get a card that can be used to play a game.

Some thought NFTs were at best a bizarre fad, and at worst some form of gluttonous excess-another ridiculous thing for people who already have everything to spend money on. (Plus, as a way to do business, blockchain-based products themselves were often met with deep skepticism, owing to the speculative nature of the emerging crypto industry, as well as the fact that some people associated cryptocurrencies with money laundering and fraud. More on that soon.)

To be fair, you might be thinking, if a company can successfully sell a product that bizarre, they must be doing something clever . . . but that just kicks the banana a little bit farther down the road.

Why would anyone pay money for a digital record associated to a picture, primate or otherwise?

It's because what they were buying was, in truth, far more than just a digital record. The NFTs were the foundation of what was emerging into an incredibly successful digitally-native, community-based brand-one of the first of its kind-called the Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Having one of the tokens was your ticket in: NFT holders "owned" their Ape images and were even given the right to use the associated intellectual property in their personal business ventures. Meanwhile, Yuga Labs was continually building new rewards and features on top of the NFTs-everything from holders-only online games to live events like an annual music festival. Yet that comprised only a fraction of the activity around the tokens: both holders themselves and third parties introduced their own forms of utility and benefits for the Bored Ape NFTs-everything from exclusive products and merchandise to large-scale immersive puzzle game experiences. Thus as the Bored Ape Yacht Club's public prominence grew, token holders shared in that success, both because it raised the value associated to the individual Bored Ape NFTs (there were only so many of them, after all), and because it expanded the range of valuable opportunities available to holders.

As a result, for many, being a Bored Ape NFT holder became part of their personal identity and way of life. They integrated their Ape images into their digital profiles-which helped raise brand awareness-and they plastered Bored Ape posters on their walls. The network of Bored Ape Yacht Club holders became a true club, a global community of brand enthusiasts, many of whom went out of their way to help one another, and in effect became a decentralized marketing arm for the Bored Ape brand. And in parallel, Yuga Labs evolved, introducing new types of products and experiences built around the Apes, with the NFT holders benefiting from exclusive or preferential access.

All of this made more and more people want to "Ape in" and join the Club-and that, along with royalties collected on NFT secondary-market sales, increased the company's revenue streams at Ape-neck speed. The excitement was so palpable that Yuga Labs made $90 million selling a second NFT collection-Mutant Apes-just a few months after launch. As new people joined the Club, the opportunities afforded by the network grew-and people took it upon themselves to organize everything from local Bored Ape meetups to weekly online "Mutant Monday" celebrations.

The feedback loop from token ownership to community brand-building took Yuga from a small startup to a multibillion-dollar unicorn in less than a year. That growth doesn't seem to have been an accident, either. Even as the broader NFT market experienced ups and downs in 2022 and 2023, Yuga continued to sustain success through NFT sales, secondary royalties, merchandise offerings, partnerships with major brands, and sponsorships for live events. In one instance, Yuga created a short-term gaming experience that expanded its holder base by 40% and raked in $2.2 million from in-game microtransactions. Shortly after that, a digital-physical merchandise partnership with Gucci made $5 million from the sale of a limited-edition pendant. And, in March 2023, the company added a fine art line that generated roughly $16 million in revenue. And these examples aren't exhaustive-in just its first years, Yuga's total revenues reached hundreds of millions of dollars.

This consistent growth alongside recurring revenue streams made Yuga so attractive that top gaming executives from Activision Blizzard (creator of World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch) and Epic Games (creator of Fortnite) joined the company to be a part of its magic. And meanwhile, numerous celebrities, established brands, and product entrepreneurs Aped in, acquiring Bored Apes and featuring them in everything from music videos to streetwear-driving yet more attention to the brand as they did so.

NFTs made all of this possible. And perhaps ironically, they are able to create such massive and wide-ranging value because they do something simple extremely well: defining digital ownership. In this book, we're going to...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593545109
ISBN 13 
9780593545102
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Portfolio
https://www.wetones.co.uk/

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