We’ve seen the future of the metaverse, and it’s all NFTs — as far as the eye can see.

We are a group of NFT lovers who have walked many paths in web2 and beyond — as founders, innovators, designers, and technologists, in VR/AR/XR, in architecture, in cryptography, in “big tech”, and more.

Although we had each been following web3 for a while from afar, our paths converged last year, when we tumbled down the NFT rabbit hole together. Like many of you, we fell head over heels in love with NFTs before we could even figure out what happened.

Now, we find ourselves all in on NFTs, and filled with a simple purpose — not to help web2 “power” the metaverse and collect all the value, but to help NFTs empower the metaverse and keep its value in the hands of the community.

How did we get here?

After taking some time to gather perspective, we wanted to share four things we believe about NFTs that make us incredibly excited for a future filled with them and for the journey that lies ahead of us.

#1 - NFTs Make Decentralization Meaningful for All

“Decentralization” has been one of the key promises of web3. While this unlocked enormous amounts of value with cryptocurrencies and blockchain-based protocols, it has so far meant little in terms of the things we actually create and consume in our everyday lives, even online.

With the proliferation and maturation of NFTs, the web3 revolution is becoming truly meaningful for everyone. To use a somewhat older framework, you might say that NFTs are helping web3 to “cross the chasm” from early adoption into the mainstream.

At its core, decentralization — or more specifically, the decentralized existence and utility of things — is just another feature of the physical world that has finally been brought into the digital world with the magic of technology. It gives things permanence, something we understand even as children.

To put it simply, in the real world, we have every reasonable expectation that when we, say, buy a car and drive it off the lot, it won’t stop working the moment we are no longer on their property. It’s not just the ownership of that car that matters, but the fact that its very existence is defined by the physical world and its utility by the laws of physics that govern it.

Our physical world was the original “decentralized” platform of existence. Once we entered the digital world, however, we made a Faustian bargain (that we weren’t even necessarily aware of) with a few web2 companies so they could provide us things that work online — but only on their property.

With web3 and NFTs in particular, we are merely bringing that basic feature into our digital world. By putting more and more definitions and utility for digital “things” in decentralized places, we are gradually recreating a stable world that doesn’t disappear the moment we step outside.

This is a world we believe serves everyone better.

#2 - NFTs Are Content, and Content is NFTs

If the fungible tokens of web3 revolutionized the way we think about abstract societal infrastructure like our financial systems and data transfer protocols, NFTs are now in the process of revolutionizing the things riding on top of those rails — i.e. content.

One way to think about this is that NFTs are a new digital primitive introduced by web3. As such, we can consider what the existence of this new digital primitive enables (or “affords”) us to do, that we couldn’t do before.

As its name suggests, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) provide a decentralized way to represent and track things that are not exactly alike (i.e. where one instance of that thing is not completely interchangeable with another instance). That is, it makes things distinguishable.

This again pretty much describes how we think about anything in the real world — where almost nothing is perfectly interchangeable with anything else, even within the same class of thing — and is especially how we want to think about things like content.

It’s not just when the original works are different, but we even want to differentiate between instances of a work — this one is mine, this is the original, this was once owned by so-and-so, etc. Distinguishability allows us to imbue things with meaning and context, things that matter to us as individuals.

Web2, on the other hand, didn’t have the ability to distinguish between content, so it had to treat content as fungible, creating copies of it wherever that content went, and treating each copy the same as any other copy, including the original. A big reason why so many people still have difficulty understanding the value of NFTs today is because they haven’t yet unlearned that web2 interpretation of the world.

NFTs are a vastly improved technology to represent things in ways that we as a society want and value — i.e. with permanence, and also distinguishability (which in turn enables ownership and access) — making NFTs the perfect way to represent any and all meaningful digital content in web3.

You might even say that with the advent of web3:

Content == NFTs

All content is NFTs, and all NFTs are content.

#3 - NFTs Will Eat the Metaverse...

Just as the “information technology” revolution hoovered up all things that could be better represented with its digital data primitive, so too will web3 hoover up all things that can be better represented with its new, more nuanced digital primitives. Information can (and will) now quickly become separated into that which is best represented in a fungible way, and that which is not.

As a result, all content online will gradually become NFTs as new creators use them, and people migrate existing things to become them, and we will see the proportion of all content represented by NFTs follow a familiar, steep S-curve.

And so, just as information technology and software helped web2 “eat the world” for the last 10 years, so will NFTs help web3 eat the world for the next 10 years (at least).

Moreover, we currently stand at the once-in-a-generation intersection of two major technology trends — web3 and metaverse — which can actually be thought of as two sides of the same coin.

Whereas web3 is about improved representational technology (i.e. representing a thing’s definition and context in a decentralized way), the metaverse is about improved rendering technology (i.e. presenting that thing back to you).

While there’s a longer thread here (for another time) about what the metaverse “really is”, this means that, regardless, the metaverse will be dominated by content, since that is what we mostly perceive (and want to perceive) in the world.

So by extension, NFTs are not just going to eat the existing world, but also the coming metaverse, which is developing at the same time.

#4 - ...And That’s a Good Thing

Given everything mentioned above, and the general inevitability of it all, it would be pretty scary if everything we cared about got sucked into a state of the world that was terrible for everyone.

Thankfully, we believe that not only are NFTs the future, but, importantly, we believe that NFTs represent a better future, not just any other future.

Taking everything above together, we can at least be sure that when everything comes to be represented by NFTs in web3, we would get back two key features of the real world that we had bargained away, decentralized permanence and distinguishability.

And with the right design mentality, we may still get to keep the best parts of web1 and web2 that we picked up along the way — massive amounts of digital content with rich, user-first experiences.

But best of all, NFTs open up a new model of control in this new world, and how value generated can be distributed amongst its contributors. By starting everything not with the platforms that make existence possible in web2, but with the community that makes the content possible in web3, we turn the power dynamic upside down.

So, as NFTs eat the metaverse, they will strip away the worst parts of web2 — centralized control and value extraction — returning control of content back into the hands of its creators and the community, like “freeing” everything that had been eaten by web2 platforms before and returning it to the people.

And we believe that’s a good thing.

fam. is creating exclusive, content-centric communities that bring people together around the NFTs they love.

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