NFT Styles are Shifting to Reflect Bear Market Sentiment

The NFT world moves fast, and everyone is always searching for the latest meta. When NFT enthusiasts use that word–meta–as a noun, what it basically refers to are trends. More precisely, they’re asking what the latest trends are that are leading the space.

Meta is a particularly useful thing to tap into, and hopefully forecast in advance, since in NFTs when a certain new concept, characteristic or style takes off, there will be an immediate flood of copycat projects chasing the trend, and some of them can make for profitable trades, with a few sticking around longer-term.

As we are now in an acknowledged bear market phase, with fidgety fearful psychology to match, the creative and conceptual NFT landscape is rapidly changing, and new meta has emerged and taken hold.

Very simple NFT projects have been flying. When crypto was still in a bull market (or enough people thought it might be), and every NFT mint seemed to be turning a profit for buyers, then projects became increasingly complex, incorporating access passes, token proposals, staking, DeFi, gaming elements (or at least promises of gaming elements), metaverse references, and multiple channels of communication.

What’s more, a culture of whitelist grinding developed. When NFTs launch, they frequently have a whitelist sale first, which is restricted to selected wallet addresses, before a public sale, which is open to all. Being on the whitelist means you are guaranteed to be able to mint a new NFT, while, if demand is high, buying on the public sale can be competitive to the point of impossibility.

As for who gets on the whitelist, that’s up to the NFT creators, but some spots would often be handed out to community members who were active, contributing participants in the project’s Discord server. While this sounds reasonable in theory, what it gradually degenerated into was traders insincerely ploughing through the hours in Discord–grinding–in the hopes of being gifted a mint.

However, the bear market appears to be washing away these layers of complexity. Cynicism has taken hold, punters are tired of interpreting winding road maps that may or may not actually be delivered, exhausted with Discord (which is partly the fault of Discord’s off-putting UX), and unwilling to grind like performing monkeys in the hope of a whitelist spot falling their way.

As a refreshing, rapid-fire alternative to this, we now see new projects that are stripped down and simple. Instead of a complicated roadmap, creators are eschewing roadmaps altogether. There is little talk of staking or token creation. Discord is being skipped, and communications are all done on Twitter, and when it comes to IP, projects are utilizing a CC0 approach, which essentially means not worrying about IP at all and putting artwork entirely in the public domain.

This is not to say that creators might not have future plans for their work, but they’re not concerned about laying out every concept to potential buyers who are burned out and welcome a less convoluted experience.

NFTs are the only part of the crypto sector that overlaps significantly with the artistic realm, and are unique in being digital financial assets that, through artwork and creative themes, can visually reflect and encapsulate the atmosphere in which they are forged.

As we have tumbled down bear market spirals into fear, uncertainty and doubt, all against a turbulent macro environment replete with disruption, war and off-color politics, NFT concepts and visuals are becoming darker weirder and more nihilistic, reflecting the overall mood of the crypto space, or even of the world at large.

This is all very different from the childlike and relentlessly cute creations that have, for the most part, dominated the NFT space up to now. From the cartoon animals of Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cool Cats, to the unthreatening pastel palettes utilized by Doodles, the aesthetic has been light-hearted, immature and escapist. Even CryptoPunks, with its leanings towards a harder form of counter-cultural subversion, trades visually on eight-bit tech nostalgia.

In place of these established WAGMI standards, we now have a different look and feel becoming prominent. Goblintown (the leading new project that has emerged during this bear market phase) is muted in its tones, and, while still unashamedly cartoonish, plunges us in with, well, goblins.

A project called We Are All Going to Die launched successfully, and, as its name suggests, pivots around shadowy themes. Add in collections such as Rektguy, Death is Inevitable, and Shrouded Playground, and there is an obvious shift in tone.

How long this new meta will continue for is difficult to predict, but it’s reasonable to expect that we may be working with such themes until the market cycle changes and the possibility of euphoria returns.

Furthermore, the NFT mood can feed off itself, looping and becoming more intense. For now, it’s perhaps advisable to get used to a cynical attitude making itself felt, and at the same time, relax into the preference for minimal, no-nonsense launch strategies.

One further development that can be anticipated with a degree of certainty, though, is that no matter what approach becomes dominant now, it will be flipped on its head and rapidly replaced in the not-too-distant future.