The Past, Present, and Future of NFTs — And Why it Will be Wild...

I want to start off by first saying, if you are reading this, you are still early. In the NFT space, “early” is a relative term – something I too have to remind myself given my NBA Top Shot account was created in August 2020 yet lacked purchases until March 2021. Also, despite the opportunity to do so, I failed to mint or buy any Bored Apes or Cool Cats. The fact remains, YOU are still early, and so am I. When I say early, I mean EARLY. It is estimated only or roughly 300 million people, owns cryptocurrency. Of those people, have a verified Coinbase account, the leading crypto trading platform. , 3.9% of the global population 73 million To put NFTs into perspective in comparison to crypto overall, as of January 2022 only around are using OpenSea, the leading NFT marketplace. Recently we have seen Coinbase announce their own NFT trading platform, Nike file trademarks digitally for all their products, Facebook change its name to Meta, and many other big-time corporations announce NFT releases in the near future. While these numbers speak for themselves, mass adoption still has yet to occur. 1 million active wallets If what I just said does not make any sense to you, fear not. After reading this article, you will have a full understanding of what the world of NFTs was, is, and what it will potentially become through the Metaverse. If you recognize the projects or companies mentioned above, continue on for an all-inclusive crash course about a space I am sure you already love. What is an NFT? NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token and are essentially any digital asset minted on a blockchain. Non-Fungible means it cannot be replicated and that each token is unique. The purpose of the blockchain in the case of NFTs is to serve as a transparent ledger documenting all transactions. This ledger system means any NFT can be traced back to the token creation to prove authenticity. Additionally, each wallet that participates in any form of blockchain transaction has a unique “wallet address.” This address is very important for the purpose of “unique ownership” which is what NFTs specifically tailor themselves to. Having this unique ownership and the ledger of the blockchain gives owners undeniable proof that the fact the NFT in their wallet is 1) real and authentic and 2) theirs to own. NFTs should be viewed simply as digital property. NFTs can be anything: a piece of art, a ticket to a football game, even a deed to a house. The possibilities are endless. The First NFT Blue Chip Project NFTs have been around since 2017. The projects that have survived since not only became grails with extreme value, but they also helped pave the wave for the current makeup of the NFT environment today. NFTs in this age were made on the Ethereum blockchain and were largely unknown to the mass population, even those within crypto social circles. One of the most important NFTs of this era that made a lasting impact on the space and still exists today is CryptoPunks. CryptoPunks was the first collection of 10,000 NFTs randomly created in a way that is now known as “the profile pic format” or PFP NFT. They were 24x24 8-bit style pixel art images that drew inspiration from the London punk scene of the 1970s. There is a total of 6,039 male Punks and 3,840 female punks within the collection. Additionally, each Punk has a distinct set of traits given to them via the randomization generative tool used to mint them. Each of these traits has differing rarities based on how many Punks feature that specific trait. For example, there are 286 Punks with 3-D glasses but only 44 Punks wearing beanies. These differences in “rarity” amongst the traits led to some Punks being worth more than others and established the standard of NFT trading today; rarity matters often more than the aesthetic of the art. For example, there are only 9 Punks that are “Aliens,” and these sell for multiple times the value of common Punks on the market. Larva Labs created the Punks and were free to anyone who paid the gas transaction fee, which at the time was pennies on the dollar. However, given their status as the first 10,000 mint count NFT collection of generative “profile picture” type art, CryptoPunks now have a floor value of 65 Ethereum. The project has served as the flag bearer for almost all other Profile Picture NFT projects to follow. Genres Making up the Present NFT World There were many blue-chip NFT projects that emerged as largely popular in 2021 and all had varying importance for increased adoption of NFTs. The five main categories of NFTs emerging as influential for increased adoption are as follows; fiat accessible, generative profile picture projects, one of one art, photography, and play to earn gaming. Each of these categories had blue-chip projects emerge and all helped propel NFTs from being merely a buzzword to becoming household talking points. Fiat Accessible Project Promoting Mass Adoption Perhaps the biggest boundary to the mass adoption of NFTs the purchasing process. For anyone who is not already a holder of a cryptocurrency that knows how to utilize a wallet such as Metamask or Phantom, purchasing an NFT can be a daunting task. It involves purchasing a supported cryptocurrency, usually Ethereum or Solana, from a crypto exchange (such as Coinbase or FTX), transferring that crypto to your crypto wallet, connecting your wallet to the NFT website or marketplace, then purchasing. While this may seem somewhat straightforward, for someone with no prior experience or knowledge of cryptocurrency, this may be off-putting enough to dissuade them from purchasing at all. This process was bypassed when Dapper Labs released NBA Top Shot and gave users the ability to make an account where they could use their debit or credit card to purchase. This step alone gave non-native crypto users the access and confidence to purchase NFTs at the click of a button for the first time. However, what led to NBA Top Shot quickly becoming one of the most popular and widely used NFTs ever was its product offering. NBA Top Shot is an officially licensed NFT product of the National Basketball Association that releases packs of “moments” featuring NFTs of a player’s highlight moments. Essentially, NBA Top Shot finds a way to bring the paper trading card business to the digital world as an NFT in a fun and new way. NBA Top Shot runs on the Flow Blockchain and as such, has no gas fees (fee required on other blockchains such as Ethereum to incentivize a miner to handle your transaction) and is able to scale large amounts of volume. The far-reaching future of NBA Top Shot according to their CEO, Roham, is to be a product that billions of people use. While the product being an officially licensed product of the NBA is their selling point, their biggest impact to the world of NFTs has been the ability to massively unlock this world to people who previously were not into crypto through their acceptance of fiat payment methods. I have no way of exactly proving this, but I am a firm believer that a high majority of credible NFT owners on Twitter today credit NBA Top Shot as being their entrance to the space. People who went on NBA Top Shot for the first time and played around were not only intrigued to give Top Shot a chance, but were also intrigued enough to dive into Discord to investigate the world of other emerging NFTs. This can be seen from the perspective that the NBA Top Shot market boomed at the end of February to March 2021 and OpenSea (the most popular NFT trading platform) reached all-time levels of volume in the months after. The Rise of the Profile Picture Project In reiterating that I do not believe NFTs would be where they are today without NBA Top Shot onboarding hundreds of thousands of people, there has seemingly been no other project to provide a launching point for NFTs as a whole like . Bored Ape Yacht Club Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) pulls its 10,000 randomly generated profile picture structures from the CryptoPunks collection. BAYC, created by Yuga Labs, was the first 10,000 collection to reach the mainstream and helped cultivate an environment where multiple collections were released every day. Not only did BAYC start a movement on the structure of NFT projects, but they also quickly became the luxury brand of NFTs rivaled only by the much older CryptoPunks. Apes were originally sold for .08 Ethereum and over the next couple months reached floor prices of 10, 50, and eventually over 100 ETH in February 2022. The floor of 89 ETH, is not only a proponent of people liking the art, but also a proponent of the community and utility provided by owning an Ape. price today Owning a Bored Ape today is a status symbol that yields real-world benefits. In talking about their community, the creators of BAYC were first movers in generating “utility” or a “roadmap” for their project. This process of having real-world utility and a roadmap has not only become an expectation for profile picture NFTs but also an absolute necessity for projects looking to sell out and grow in value. BAYC has delivered in ways no other project in history has before. They were the first project to airdrop another NFT to wallets holding Apes. They did this in the form of Dogs matching the traits of Apes held known as Bored Ape Kennel Club. Again, BAYC set the standard for other projects to follow. Nowadays it is very common for NFT projects to release “airdrops” to holders of their NFT. BAYC followed this up with exclusive merchandise only sold to collectors of the Apes. They then surprise dropped Mutant Ape Yacht Club (MAYC) which was a collection of 20,000 total possible Mutants. This involved a 10,000 piece public mint for 3 Ethereum each. In the span of one hour, Yuga Labs generated $96 million in sales. The other 10,000 Mutants were airdropped to Ape owners via a serum that could pair with the ape to create a Mutant, for FREE. As far as real-world utility, BAYC hosted a party on a Yacht in New York City exclusively for holders during NFT NYC and have released a Play to Earn mobile game for Ape holders with further goals of opening a real-life Bored Ape Yacht Club in Miami. There is no telling the asking price for one of these Apes as more and more people are onboarded to the world of NFTs and want to join NFTs’ greatest community. Scrolling through Twitter nowadays you will see countless NFT projects represented as the profile pictures of different accounts. This is in direct response to the effect BAYC and CryptoPunks had and the generation of Profile Picture NFT projects that followed. Given the price exclusivity of Punks and Apes, it should come as no surprise that they were not the only profile picture collection of NFTs to reach blue-chip status during this time. was released as a collection of 3,000 NFTs and quickly became the first project to reach over 50% unique ownership amongst its NFTs. Gutter Gang Cats was another project that skyrocketed to floor values over 15 ETH and is now hovering around 8 ETH. One of the impressive things about Cool Cats is after their release they spent time stationary at their mint price of .02 ETH before their surge to blue chip status. Cool Cats More recently, and released and have floors of 10.6 and 10.2 ETH respectively. Doodles Azuki was a collection deemed to be the “Doge Coin of NFTs if CryptoPunks were the Bitcoin.” Pudgy Penguins was a collection that spent days dormant at prices of .02 ETH before shooting up to a floor of over 4 ETH where it has since hovered around 1 ETH. Additionally, while they are a collection of 8,888, Pudgy Penguins became the second profile picture collection to reach 50% unique ownership. Pudgy Penguins I bring up other projects to show while potentially 90 to 95% of all profile picture projects will be worthless in a couple of years, there are quality projects with the potential to stand the test of time far more affordable than an Ape or Punk. Bringing the Artist Back to the Focus The mass supply of projects created by Bored Ape Yacht Club and other Profile Picture projects launching made it easy for consumers to be all consumed searching for profit. The idea that rarity or hype around a project was more important than the actual artwork seemed to dominate the NFT space as investors attempted to secure a 10x or even 100x on their initial investments. Many people, including myself, invested in projects that did not necessarily appeal from an aesthetic point of view, purely searching for profit. However, it was with this mindset and a much-needed correction of this mindset, that the beauty and respect for art really came to light. One of the most transcending artists in the genre of one of one art that emerged is . GxngYxng is the creator and imaginary artist behind the Collection. GxngYxng Ghxsts Ghxsts was first started in early May of 2021, almost coinciding with the Bored Ape Yacht Club release of late April. I bring up the similar release dates to emphasize one of one artwork production in the NFT space occurred during the same time frame as the start of the Profile Picture Projects era. Ghxsts is a project that helped break the boundaries separating mainstream profile picture projects and one of one artwork. The Ghxsts are sketches of “ ” that GxngYxng has described to feel almost like self-portraits. The art has an almost sad touch of a desire to belong. The project initially had a mint price of .001 Ethereum and took 24 hours to sell out the first 5 Ghxsts created. Over time, the Ghxsts community gradually grew and the Ghxsts Collection expanded. Originally slated to have just 102 Ghxsts, all one of one edition pieces, the collection expanded to have multiple other subsets of the Ghxsts. lost souls Many of these were airdropped to holders based on if they held Ghxsts or a certain combination of the collection. For example, Immxrtals came from holders merging two Ghxsts together. Additionally, GxngYxng released pieces that had multiple editions, like the Lunar Zxdiac, which had 10 designs with 30 editions each and granted holders a free airdrop over the course of 12 months. The community grew as the collection grew and the demand for these drops reached a point where drops were selling out instantly. Nowadays, the floor for a 1 of 1 Ghxst is 159 ETH and the floor for a 30 edition Lunar Zxdiac is around 5.5 ETH. However, the story of GxngYxng and the immense success of Ghxsts is not defined by a floor price. It is defined by how NFTs and the surrounding community gave an artist who had not shown his Ghxsts to anyone the confidence to leave his stable job as an animator and pursue a career as an NFT artist. This decision led to him having a headline exhibit at NFT New York, having one of his pieces sell for 619.5 Ethereum (at the time 2 million dollars) and being one of the first official NFT projects to partner with the upcoming Coinbase NFT marketplace. I highlight GxngYxng and his Ghxst collection because of the astounding rise to fame he achieved through his NFTs and the community built around them. However, there are many other noteworthy and astounding artists who have also built their own communities in the NFT space or are in the early stages of building their portfolio and following. Some of these artists include , , and . They all have varying popularity and followings and have unique, appealing art. The discussion of other artists also helps bring the artist back to the focus point from a collector’s point of view. Showdeer Killer Acid Nudey I fully believe the profile picture era of projects will fade out for a large majority of projects, meaning many will fail. Projects like Bored Ape Yacht Clubs and Cool Cats will survive, but one of one art by artists who create a following will also be immensely successful for years to come in the NFT world. The Emergence of Photography Photography as an art form really benefits from its usage as NFTs because of how ownership works on the blockchain. Previously, anyone could print out an image shot by a photographer, get it framed, and no one could tell it was a fake. I feel this led to photography going under-appreciated from a value perspective. Creating NFT photography collections changes this because it is now easier and more apparent than ever to prove ownership and authenticity. While this form of NFTs is relatively untapped, a few stars have emerged and many others continue to emerge. Also, at a base level, anyone with a camera can take photos and use them as NFTs. NFT technology makes it easier than ever to publish photographs for sale. This is in no means diminishing the talent and expertise needed to be a high-quality photographer; rather, I am showing how much room there is for the NFT photography market to explode because of its accessibility to anyone with a camera. There are a few stars in the NFT photography space and arguably none are more in demand than . His collection of “ ” was shot as a set of 100 photos all featuring a different set of twins. Justin Aversano Twin Flames He came up with the idea for the shots as a tribute to his own twin brother who passed away in utero. The collection was shot around the world between 2017 and 2018 and was minted as Ethereum-based NFTs in February of 2021. Since then, it has reached the wallets of Snoop Dogg and Gary Vaynerchuk while accumulating a total trading volume of 4.7k Ethereum on OpenSea. Additionally, in a groundbreaking sale, one of his pieces was auctioned off at Christies, the only NFT photography offered, and had a sales price of 1.1 . Justin Aversano is the first celebrity in the NFT photography space, and his sale at Christies proved NFT photography is here to stay. million dollars Another well-known NFT photographer is Isaac Wright who goes by on Twitter. A former paratrooper in the Army, Wright was honorably discharged from service and diagnosed with PTSD. Unable to continue attending in person psychotherapy because of the Covid pandemic, Wright found release in scaling large buildings and perching at the top. @DrifterShoots He created a collection called “ ,” which is 115 photos showing his feet in Vans at the top of various buildings or tall structures around the world. The shots are stunning and are meant to convey the idea that the journey is derived from the struggle; without this “climb,” you never see the view. Drifter built quite a following, and his collection has traded over 2.5 thousand Ethereum on OpenSea with a floor price of 47 Ethereum. Where My Vans Go Finally, the ability to snap a picture and post it for sale as an NFT has made it easier than ever to support a cause you believe in. I stumbled upon one instance of this with the work of . By all accounts, Chris Otis is a normal guy with a passion for photography and the desire to make a difference. Living in Vietnam since 2017 and being up close and personal to the effects of COVID, Otis decided to mint the collection. Chris Otis Stay Strong VN Stay Strong VN is a set of 20 carefully selected photographs he took around Vietnam chosen in order to represent the beauty and resilient spirit of Vietnam. Otis pledged to give 60% ($3200 according to the OpenSea page) of the initial sales directly to charity in order to help the city of Ho Chi Minh’s most vulnerable citizens handle the effects of COVID-19. Otis’s charity donation has helped hundreds of families eat and receive essential medical and hygiene care. All of this was possible because of his ability to post photographs as NFTs. The point of bringing up these three photographers, all with varying level of recognizability, is to show the importance of photography in this space. People can connect with a message behind a photograph in ways a profile picture project or abstract art cannot compete. While NFT photography has lagged behind in notoriety compared to the other NFT categories mentioned, it is still a critical genre of art. I am fully expecting the NFT photography market to rapidly expand as more people become accustomed to the NFT features of authenticity and legitimacy. Giving Power to the GAMER The category of NFTs I predict will bring true mass adoption is one that is by all accounts still in its infancy: the world of gaming with NFTs. This revolution and consequent explosion will come directly at the hands of something called the “play to earn” model. Games with this model in mind require players to pay, but give them the opportunity to earn money as a result of their progression or ability in-game. Gone are the days of children spending hundreds of their parent’s dollars on Fortnite skins that are not transferable or worth anything outside of the game. Gone are the days of spending countless hours progressing and leveling up in a game, only to eventually turn it off and never play it again, having gained nothing but pleasure over the efforts exhausted. Eventually, every AAA gaming production company will transition to using the Play to Earn model and incorporate their expertise into games developed to run on the blockchain. When this happens, NFTs will realize a level and an audience never seen before. However, we are talking about the present and there is no blockchain gaming giant quite like Axie Infinity. Axie Infinity is a blockchain game developed by Vietnamese studio, Sky Mavis, where players collect (buy and sell), breed, raise, battle, and trade creatures known as “Axies.” Every creature in the game is a digitized NFT. Think of a Pokémon style game, but instead of it being locked on a Nintendo device, it runs on the blockchain and users are able to earn profit just from playing through its incorporation of the “Play to earn” model. In order to begin playing new players must purchase three Axies for roughly a couple hundred dollars each. Through the “play to earn” model, players are able to earn AXS (Axie Infinity Shards), valued at roughly $50 a shard. In June 2021, it was reported many people in the Philippines were playing the game as their main source of income to combat the effects of COVID. Since then, the game has grown to more than a million daily users and in September 2021 became the NFT with the largest market cap for a period of time. The main attraction to this style of game is any collectible or Axie collected by the player, is owned by the player, not the gaming studio. As mentioned above there is a very large market for this type of gaming model. Currently, many games have a “Series pass” where players can earn certain collectibles for a limited amount of time-based on level progression or ability. However, there is no marketplace for these and they are linked solely to the user’s account. Games such as Fortnite and Call of Duty feature millions of daily players with Fortnite featuring approximately 30 million daily users across different devices. If Fortnite and Call of Duty switched their “Series passes” to feature NFTs, all of these users would enter the P2E and NFT world. Whereas these are just two prime examples, the gaming market as a whole features hundreds of millions of players and is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Once we see AAA gaming studios transition to the world of blockchain gaming, the rapid expansion of NFTs and mass adoption will be a breathtaking site. The Future of the NFT World: The Metaverse Overall, I am a firm believer in the technology NFTs utilize and I am a firm believer in the world revolution mass adoption technology will cause. I firmly believe we are entering an era for the “new age internet.” Where being on the internet no longer means people are just consumers, they are personal owners on content and media they consume through the use of NFTs. I believe NFTs will become a part of everyday life in the very near future. I think tickets to every sporting event or concert, and the movie theater, will all become NFTs. I believe the deed to houses will become NFTs. I believe membership passes companies will be offered in some sort of tokenized NFT. This new age internet will cause a new age for society, an intersection of all the different genres of NFTs, and it will have a name. It will be the Metaverse. In order to fully understand what the Metaverse can be, and has the chance to become, public perception needs to move past the feeling that it is a buzzword. It is much more than that, it will a worldwide evolution of society. While the transition to a society-wide Metaverse could be a year away or 10 years away, I do know it will happen. As mentioned above, I whole heartily believe blockchain technology, the idea of digital ownership, and the idea of proven authenticity, will only continue to become further intertwined with society. This will bring more ideas, funding, and notoriety to Metaverse ideas. The Metaverse will become the new age of social media – a social media where people care more about what NFTs or art you own than how many likes you received on your last Instagram post. This aspect of the Metaverse is more or less certain in my eyes; it will be societies’ new internet identity. Touching on the unknown of the scale of the Metaverse, the possibilities are endless. On one extreme, there is the "Ready Player One" option. For those who have not seen this movie, or read this book, I highly encourage consuming this content in order to open your eyes and mind to what the Metaverse could become in the future. In this story, people care more, and spend more time in Oasis, a virtual world, (through the use of VR headsets and haptic suits) where they are able to create and spend money on their digital avatars and live a digital life. It truly is living life inside of a video game. The perception of reality is morphed, and people are more or less lost in "real" life depending on what happens inside Oasis. While I think this idea of an all-consuming virtual reality is far out, I only think it is far out because we currently lack the mass adoption of high-quality virtual headsets and the ability for haptic suits to make what happens in the video game feel real. If and when the real-life technology catches up, I think this reality of a Metaverse will be upon society quicker than we can imagine. There are aspects of Ready Player One that are right around the corner. It is my opinion that the Metaverse in its early stages will take activities we normally do in person, or online and morph them into some aspect of virtual reality – one of which is digital shopping. I think the idea of taking your virtual avatar to a Nike store or Adidas via a Metaverse entity will happen in the very near future. Online shopping will change from browsing websites to taking your avatar to different Metaverse store locations to get a fuller sense of trying outfits on. Another Metaverse change will be your social network. People are going to care more about what art you have collected, what NFT you use as your avatar, and what other NFTS are in your collection than ever cared about the nice watch you own or the nice car you drive. This will be social media on steroids. In the Metaverse, users will be able to have art galleries dedicated to what they own, all proven in legitimacy and ownership through the uses of blockchain ledgers and technology. However, these aspects are still more or less strictly digital aspects of the Metaverse. One way I think the Metaverse will manifest these digital aspects into real life is through the use of augmented reality (AR). It is my belief AR glasses will become the norm in the next 2 to 3 years. With AR, people will be able to walk into stores and try shirts on, while also seeing what those shirts would look like on their digital avatars. They will also be able to walk by people on the street and view them as their avatars, not as people. If you own a Bored Ape, the use of AR technology will make it so people passing you by, know you own one as well. It is my belief in order to get to a "Ready Player One" type of Metaverse, AR technology needs to help make the transition to the Metaverse as seamless as possible for the common person who is not native to NFTs or the use of blockchain technology. That is, AR may become the bridge that helps fully make Metaverse possibilities fully realized to the mass population. What a Successful Metaverse Project Will Look like: Hint it is Wild I have mentioned a handful of Metaverse possibilities and truthfully could speak for pages and pages about different possibilities. I now want to transition into what I think it will take for a Metaverse product to become mainstream as opposed to being seen as "just another video game". I whole heartily believe THE Metaverse that is adopted by society needs to have AAA-style gameplay and graphics, meaning it is as real as possible in a way that is scalable to millions or even billions of users. This style of graphics also needs to be found in a decentralized entity in a way that allows seamless integrations of other projects. These criteria immediately eliminate almost all of the product offerings currently in place that title themselves as "Metaverse" options. The more popular choices my criteria eliminates are; Meta (is a corporation, formerly Facebook, lacks quality graphics), Sandbox (lacks AAA graphics and scalability), and Decentraland (lacks AAA graphics and scalability). I will not go into detail about these other projects because I want to highlight a project I think has everything it needs to be THE true Metaverse, but I will input a link that highlights Sandbox and Decentraland . here The project I believe possessing everything to win out and bring about the mass adoption of the Metaverse is . Wilder World is a decentralized, fully immersive VR and AR integrated experience boasting stunning AAA graphics. It is also the only current Metaverse project building a full-scale metaverse platform. Wilder World It runs on the Zero platform, which is the underlying technology making up this fully immersive, scalable, and beautiful metaverse environment called zSpace. zSpace is made up of universes, galaxies, and planets. Wilder World is the first universe that will be launched in zSpace. Since it is a universe, Wilder World will contain galaxies and many worlds within it, all visitable and usable by Wilder World citizens. The level of scalability Wilder World possesses through using the Zero platform and zSpace is something no other Metaverse option can compete with. Within zSpace there is a possibility for 1,024 Universes (each holding up to 256 galaxies), 262,144 Galaxies (each galaxy can hold up to 256 worlds) and 67,108,864 worlds. Each galaxy features a land limit of 1,800km2, or close to the surface area of Alaska. Additionally, the ideas of persistence occur in the simulation. When events occur in Wilder World, such as a car crashing or the weather changing, it will be capable of being experienced by all players at the same time, like a real-life event. It is obvious Wilder World has the land area to support billions of players, but they also have the technology to support this scalability. zSpace has the ability to support billions of players with trillions of unique assets, they call it “full internet scale”. The Zero platform, zSpace, and Wilder World are all explained in a much more expansive way in . this guide In discussing their AAA graphics, the team behind Wilder World has shown their digital design expertise through their NFT releases. All their NFTs are primed on Unreal Engine 5 Engine to be fully usable within Wilder World once it is launched. The NFTs that have dropped already are; Air Wild (shoes), Wheels (cars), Crafts (hover crafts), and Cribs (first luxury condos). Each collection is among the highest quality and highest utility serving NFTs ever created. For example, the wheels are fully drivable once Wiami, the first Wilder World city being built, opens. Wiami happens to be a one to one scale geographical replica of Miami and features dynamic landscapes and weather changes experienced by all players in real time. Coming up next, the project will mint “ ,” NFTs which will serve as both Wilder World’s first profile picture project and as companions for characters playing within Wilder World. Pets With Pets coming soon and being their most affordable NFT to date, I am expecting a lot more people to know who and what the Wilder World team is offering as a possibility for a metaverse project. Wilder World possesses AAA graphics with large-scale capability, but what about my final criteria of possessing seamless integration of other projects in a decentralized manner? If you have seen Ready Player One, you remember people’s avatars taking inspiration from all sorts of brands, characters, and projects. Wilder World will support the ability for people to import their NFT avatars to be used as characters. For example, users will be able to take their Bored Ape and use it as their avatar. Users will be able to integrate and show off their other NFTs such as 1 of 1 art or NFT photography. Companies and brands will be able to buy land and build stores to sell their products in Wilder World universes and other zSpace universes. Even other P2E games like Axies Infinity and Metaverse projects like Sandbox could have their own Universe imported into zSpace because of the Zero platform. Quite frankly, Wilder World will be able to support the integration of any and all of the NFT genres discussed above; it’s an intersection of all NFT categories. Continuing on the topic of decentralization, Wilder World puts no limits on who and what can create a Universe, Galaxy, or Planet. I could theoretically create a planet in the Wilder World universe and set up different games and activities that users could come to play. This decentralized creator mentality gives autonomy and freedom to companies, artists, and individual users not seen in any other metaverse product offering. Yes, the scalability and graphics are amazing and are both must-haves for a Metaverse project, but it is the seamless integration that will make Wilder World a mainstay in the Metaverse world. Wilder World is built to be the future Metaverse. What Roaming in Wiami and Wilder World Will Mean If Wilder World fulfills my expectations and becomes the Metaverse project that attracts billions of users, the “Wilder Spirit” will mean many things. At its core, the Wilder Spirit will mean freedom. Freedom of expression, freedom from corporation, freedom to create, freedom to enjoy, and freedom to live. It is this freedom that will revolutionize the forming Metaverse landscape. With this freedom, the days of being held back by large tech corporations are numbered. Members will be able to transform and manifest nearly any idea they deem possible within Wilder World and the surrounding ZSpace universes. Additionally, roaming in Wiami and Wilder World will also bring users into a special community, the Wilder Community. This community is fully inclusive and welcoming for anyone. There is a reason Wilder World aims to be the host for other NFT projects and Metaverse projects, they want to continue to grow Web3 into a fully inclusive and interactive entity. Being a member of Wilder World brings about limitless possibilities for how you can create your Web3 digital image. The ability for Zero and ZSpace to operate in a fully decentralized, all-inclusive manner cements the idea that the Metaverse will be created for the people, by the people, exactly how it should be. Wilder World will be the pinnacle of Web3 adoption. How will the Wilder Spirit manifest itself in you? Wrap Up In this article, I did my best to cover a broad history of NFT projects that got us to today. 2021 saw a rapid influx of both users and projects that helped propel the world of NFT technology to become a household term. Partway through 2022, we seem to be witnessing a new corporation discuss NFTs or the Metaverse almost every day. I sought to paint a picture of what the Metaverse could look like and share my opinion about Wilder World in a way that accurately portrays its possibilities as being the Metaverse mainstay. It is obvious worldwide adoption for NFTs and the impending Metaverse have not happened yet, but when it does, the future may very well be Wild. See you in Wiami. Tip Jar Enjoy the article? Consider leaving a tip to support my efforts. All donations are greatly appreciated! 03QUxNcUJ2BZLg5p5xvznmjH83Z5UXY7bY2 Coinbase (BTC): 0xA7043DaE48d6bc109FBbd84CB12B564b9A1443D6 Metamask (ETH): 2tDMCThUZKjoNwf9E8Rw4ef32M9bLh87JTmwez4R6mUE Phantom (SOL): Disclaimer: This article is written purely for entertainment and educational purposes and should not be taken as financial advice in any way. Do your own research and, if you are seeking financial advice, find a professional who is right for you.