I have spent 2 years my life, and thousands of hours as a participant in Web3. I started as a curious enthusiast, became a collector, evolved into an educator/commentator, and then a founder.

I never made a dollar in NFTs, deliberately. Quite the opposite, really. I am in the red hundreds of thousands of dollars. I always said that I couldn’t win unless the community did.

It was once-in-a-lifetime cultural moment that so many were eager to experiment with – and over time, it’s become clear that it is deeply flawed.

So we have announced in Discord that we are shutting down any further development on MV3.

The IP and the story will live on, the NFTs will remain as collectibles, and the existing integrations (like in Eluna) will continue to exist, but there will be no further development on the NFT project.

I know some folks are going to be angry at this situation. But the truth of the matter is, that every way you look at the situation (and I have walked through every possible scenario) – it always leads to a dead end.

Let me walk you through it.

The NFT market is purely predicated on manufactured sentiment. That’s it. That is the game.

There are hundreds of projects that have came and gone who have built much more substantial things than many blue-chip collections. It doesn’t matter. Attention is what the market trades on.

Well wait, aren’t I reaching tens of millions of accounts per month through content? Why not start to generate a ton of attention?

Let’s walk through it. Attention is created – floor price goes up.

Here’s the thing. The collection can no longer profit off of volume – royalties have disappeared. The floor could be 0 or it could be 100, it would make no difference.

Wait, but if the floor price is high? Wouldn’t that present an opportunity to do another paid collection? And in turn, drive more fomo to the primary collection?

For the same reasons I left millions of dollars on the table when running Metav3rse, this could never happen. It’s pure ponzinomics and 100% unsustainable. Crypto is PVP. The only way to win here, is for others to lose. Minting more collections just delays the inevitable. Every project participating in this will eventually face the same dead-end (Not that they care, because they are making a fortune in the meantime).

Well, can’t you just pump it so we can exit? Great, we can trade some disheartened community members for soon-to-be disheartened community members. For someone to win, someone else has to lose. In the meantime, the IP and project doesn’t benefit in any way.

So there is no way, that is moral or ethical, to create a sustainable business of the NFT collection.

Yes, we could buy a ton of MV3 NFTs on burner wallets and adjacent addresses, inflate attention, then dump it on naive holders.

Obviously - that’s not even remotely a possibility for us. But funny enough - this is literally the game in NFTs. I just can’t bring myself to play that game.

But what about bull market project X? We cannot compare. There are projects that raised tens of millions of dollars and they have the resources to continue driving FOMO for years, if not decades. As one prominent NFT founder told me, the game is to “perpetually make your community think something big is around the corner.”

So what about building an actual business model? Absolutely. I believe many of the NFT projects today could become incredibly profitable IP or businesses. And their founders, actual investors, and equity-holding employees will make a lot of money. But with no royalties, and no regulatory framework in place to share profits or equity with token holders – the NFT side of the business, especially as holders, is futile.

Nothing matters, except for the ability to manufacture sentiment, establish narratives, and artificially increase pricing.

This is why I thought NFTs truly lost their magic when royalties died. They became, as Cobie famously said, “alt-coins with pictures.” That “aha moment” that brought so many people into the space was removed.

Look, in the journey of entrepreneurship, you have many successes and many failures. While I don’t consider MV3 to be a failure, because it established life-long friendships, made a lot of money for those who helped moderate, code, create the art, etc – I will still categorize it as so.

I plan on building stuff for the next 4 decades. Without a doubt I will have many more failures, and many more successes.

Shutting down a project when there is no PMF and the data clearly indicates that time and energy should no longer be expended on it is an easy choice. After all, my mantra has always been “ship fast, fail fast.”

With MV3, it’s difficult, because of the community – of which I have gotten to know many so well and consider friends.

I spent hundreds, if not a thousand hours in Discord over 18 months, always being available for the community, 24/7. Even though I knew it would never yield me a dollar.

Without a doubt, winding down the project is the right choice.

Part of me wants to keep building, knowing that it would continue to be on a volunteer-basis, just to prove naysayers wrong and to establish a “win” for the community.

And I almost would. Except for that a “win” would mean a “loss” for so many new entrants. And the cycle repeats. Again, it’s a dead-end any way you look at it.

After spending over 2 years in the space, I could write a book on the it as it exists today and it’s inherent flaws.

But this video below sums it up so perfectly well. It came out during the height of the NFT bull run and I remember barely skimming through it, not really interested in what it had to say. The bull market was so much fun. There was nothing like nft-chat. We were all caught up in a whirlwind of excitement.

When I really sat down to listen last week, I found myself agreeing with every word. Dude was prescient.

If you’re going to continue participating in the NFT market, as it stands today, please understand that it is purely a casino predicated on artificially driven sentiment. It is comprised of influencers who set narratives, and generate wealth for themselves for doing so successfully.

And look, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, one could argue it’s a feature – not a bug. We have found a way to ‘casinofy' culture.

But unless the infrastructure is dramatically changed to allow for actual business models to exist, that’s all the NFT space as we know it today is – the culture casino. As much as people to try to dress it up as something more substantial.

MV3 was an incredibly exciting experiment with unbelievable highs and lows, and I am so grateful for the team and community for the wonderful journey.

Roberto