PANTS: Across the Nanoverse III
@nattorare
19/12/2022
3 minute read
Building through the Angry Bear
For most projects minted during 2021 and still building: serious founders recognize that the space and its people are shifting. While excitement and euphoria dies down, the active user base bleeds; not only do the markets go to war, but so do the ideals and beliefs contained within.
While market makers fight for financial value, communities clash over cultural values. NFT projects and enthusiasts today read the writing on the wall: that being an NFT project alone would not be financially sustainable. So for projects recognizing stagnance or lack, they begin to work frantically towards finding solid funding in this turbulent digital space.
Consequently, market speculators and traders would no longer be able to rely on ‘meta trends’ of years past, and neither could founders.
Winter has come.
Pants recalls the times she would receive requests for consultation: “I know that what they're looking for is like: ‘tell us how to do the marketing, tell us how to successfully maintain the project.’ Well, the truth is I don't know anymore. You really have to live in the moment and try to front run the space one step at a time - at all times, and whatever I learned last December, no longer applies.”
FUD! FUD! FUD!
A commonly flagged issue within NFT Twitter as the town hall of NFT public sentiment is the prevalence of asymmetrical information, and the inability to discern between a learned or an emotionally charged opinion.
In this competitive attention economy: information is always digested half way, while fleeting sentiments appear more permanent in writing. The crowded public sentiment tends to gravely overestimate the capabilities of a project short term, while underestimating consistent delivery for the long term.
True to their household status: Nanoverse & PxN are no strangers to turbulent sentiment.
As the team builds through soaring highs and crashing lows; they’ve seen it all from the traffic within their social channels. With so much volatility within the two ecosystems, vocal opinions toward the sibling projects are not only polarizing, but extremely fickle.
Some example threads of FUD toward the team include:
- Cash Grabbing and/or Soft Rugging
- Serial Partying
When a frenzied public began accusing Pants for partying in Bali with the PxN team; she comically remarks she had never set foot in Bali before at the time.
That is not to say all the FUD goes dismissed. For PxN specifically, there were older versions of legendaries and rares within their 10 '000 Ghost profile picture collection which contained direct references to other anime franchises. This was met with negative reviews by NFT twitter sentiment; citing myriad reasons such as a cheapening of the overall brand and copyright concerns.
This began several months of production hell for the PxN team - Pants recounts:
"Post-mint what we found was that we could not get the same contracts that we had pre-mint. Because these are very reputable studios… that we had on board. We had a contract with them that ended some days before the mint happened and they had pipelined other work going into the future...And so they worked for us on a very part time basis. They were going on holiday. They were being deployed to other projects... So we had a skeleton of a team trying to pull together these epics and legendaries... When we're dealing with those changes it makes things even less efficient from the management side."
Regardless, this would mean that as production lags on: the public sentiment and floor price for the PxN Ghost collection would bleed to sub 1Ξ lows due to the team delivering at a slower pace. As experienced founders however, Pants and the Nano-PxN teams embrace FUD, holding themselves accountable for their shortcomings:
“There's lots of these little things that get spun out of control,” Pants describes, “but we're not alone in that it happens to other founders, other projects at different scales, and what I've come to realize is that this is just what the space is like, and it is our responsibility to turn that sentiment around and not just shut those people down… It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”