Thread by @cdixon

1/ NFTs grew dramatically this year, finishing the first half of 2021 with over $2.5B in sales reuters.com/technology/nft…

2/ Here is a breakdown by top platforms

https://twitter.com/masonnystrom/status/1413144730175565830?s=21

3/ NFTs platforms generally have low take rates, ranging from 2.5% to 15% (blockchains shift power to users -> low switching costs -> low take rates). This means most of the $2.5B went to creators and collectors.

4/ This is in stark contrast to incumbent Web 2 platforms that take anywhere from 30% (app stores) to 100% (social networks).

5/ The media narrative around NFTs has tended to focus on high priced one-off sales like Christie’s auctions, but in reality NFTs are best understood as a grassroots movement spanning a range of categories, including avatars (CryptoPunks, BAYC), games (Axie, Zed),...

6/ ...collectibles (Top Shot), digital art (Foundation, SuperRare), and various up-and-coming new areas.

7/ The incumbent Web 2 model for funding creative people - ads and algorithmic feeds - is deeply broken. Inspired by the success of digital goods in video games, NFTs offer a much better way to make money online. I wrote more about this here a16z.com/2021/02/27/nft…

8/ NFTs are just getting started. OpenSea -- the largest NFT marketplace — is generally a good proxy for the industry, and on pace to have its best month ever, tracking to around $200M in gross sales duneanalytics.com/rchen8/opensea

9/ The most exciting chart is the number of new developers/creative projects entering the space. Each new project expands the design space and seeds a new wave of creators and developers

https://twitter.com/xanderatallah/status/1414570777735802884?s=2

10/ It’s likely that NFTs will be cyclical, similar to crypto more broadly. These cycles appear chaotic but have an underlying logic as we outline here a16z.com/2020/05/15/the…

11/ Long term, we think NFTs will onboard hundreds of millions of new users into crypto, and will be a cornerstone of Web 3, helping to free users and creators from intrusive, high take-rate centralized intermediaries.