Viewpoint: The world is a massive Meme
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Viewpoint: The world is a massive Meme
NFTs are more about paying for emotions; project teams need to provide holders with sufficient "sense of gain."
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: sleepy
As an NFT entrepreneur—especially one who launched a collection on Ethereum—my mindset has inevitably been affected these days, and I've also seen many people discussing whether ETH NFTs are already dead. So through this article, I'd like to share some of my thoughts and reflections, hoping it can help everyone participate more effectively in NFT projects—and perhaps even restore a bit of faith.
Why Are ETH NFTs Bleeding Out?
The current market reality needs no elaboration; let's briefly analyze the reasons.
As we all know, NFT is a relatively small circle. When Bitcoin surged and drove NFT projects within its ecosystem into a frenzy, many ETH NFT players shifted their attention accordingly.
And in the current bull market, anyone not making money feels anxious—even those who’ve earned something may feel uneasy seeing others profit far more.
So it’s not hard to understand why ETH NFTs are bleeding out.
Capital that was once circulating within the ETH NFT space has now moved toward BTC NFTs and other cryptocurrencies. Many have also chosen to sell off their ETH NFTs to secure liquid funds.
Additionally, numerous farmers who previously mined on Blur have stopped doing so. Before, they provided exit liquidity for many projects by placing bids to earn BLUR tokens, which helped prevent floor prices from crashing even when holders sold. Now that they’ve withdrawn this support, a single large sale can easily drop a project’s floor price by 20% to 30%, or even more. When combined with margin liquidations, the situation becomes even worse.
The World Is One Big Meme
Next, I want to touch on another topic—one I’ve recently seen discussed in various communities: whether this downturn in ETH NFTs represents a bursting bubble or simply panic-driven undervaluation.
How to price NFTs remains an unsolved problem. In my view, there isn’t really such a thing as a “value coin” among today’s NFT projects. Therefore, I don’t believe we should estimate NFT prices using traditional valuation frameworks. Compared to groundbreaking financial innovations like UNI or CRV, most NFT projects primarily offer emotional value.
In this sense, NFTs mirror the broader crypto industry: we trade emotions, and we profit from emotions. We often say that what sets NFT projects apart is their highly engaged communities—but we see the same with projects like PEPE.
To me, whether on Ethereum, Bitcoin, or any other chain, NFT projects are fundamentally memes. The entire world is one giant meme. Otherwise, how could Azuki or BAYC command tens of thousands per unit based purely on "intrinsic value"? It's all just memes. Buying NFTs means paying for your own emotions; hyping NFTs means paying for someone else’s emotions.
NFTs and the Sense of Gain
Now let’s talk about the “sense of gain” that NFTs bring to holders. A few days ago, I had a phone call with @freeguyyee (Uncle Erji), where we discussed this very issue—a crucial topic, though we didn’t reach a conclusion that day.
We started this discussion because recently in communities, many have said “NFTs always punish diamond hands.” We believe this sentiment arises because emotional hype drives NFT prices to peak quickly, followed by a sustained decline. Diamond hands choose to hold rather than sell at the top, yet currently, almost no projects offer enough tangible rewards to justify long-term holding.
Frankly speaking, this is an area where we still fall short.
Seeking greater personal returns is completely normal and reasonable, so we can't fully prevent flippers. But from a project team’s perspective, the solution seems to lie in making people believe NFTs deserve higher valuations—and to achieve that belief, we must deliver real “sense of gain” to holders.
Next, I’d like to briefly discuss—without revealing too much—what we’re currently working on regarding this sense of gain.
I think we can crudely divide the “sense of gain” into two categories: economic gain and emotional gain.
On economic gains, I believe everyone understands: we absolutely cannot rely on endless token drops or artificial pumping. For one, the market timing isn’t right; second, it’s unsustainable and would eventually cripple the company, leading to project failure. Our approach instead is to enable holders to earn more external benefits simply by holding Little Ghosts. For example, we’re upgrading the Little Ghosts Spirit Power system and lottery mechanism, aiming to make these function natively without third-party tools, better rewarding diamond hands as intended.
Recently, a top-tier technical expert joined our Little Ghosts team—he’s made significant contributions across multiple developer communities. With his arrival, initiatives we’ve long wanted to implement but lacked the technical capacity for can now move forward rapidly, giving us greater agility going forward.
On the emotional side of gain: over the past period, we’ve been heads-down building the Little Ghosts IP. Today, we might even claim that Little Ghosts is the most active NFT project in cross-industry collaborations. Through our efforts, we hope holders can confidently use a Little Ghosts profile picture without fear of being mocked as degens. We want every holder to feel proud of owning a Little Ghosts—that pride is our driving force.
Unlike many other projects, our team built everything from scratch. We weren’t born with silver spoons, nor do we have ten years of experience in traditional industries, or prior entrepreneurial or industrial investment track records. At the start, our access to resources was extremely limited. Yet through sincerity and passion, we’ve come this far. Our foundation wasn’t strong, but today we’re not inferior to anyone—in fact, we’re ahead of many. Most of our team are insiders who actively trade crypto themselves, which perhaps explains why we lean more on passion than treating Little Ghosts as a quick flip-and-dump scheme for fast profits.
Throughout the past two bear-market years, we’ve pushed hard to grow the Little Ghosts IP in the Web2 world, launching numerous brand collabs. However, the positive feedback from these partnerships has been quite limited, so we’ve often doubted whether this path was truly valuable.
A few days ago during my call with Uncle Erji, I asked him: “From a holder’s perspective, when you see us partnering with major Web2 brands, does it give you a sense of pride—or any sense of gain?” He replied: “Yes, definitely.”
That moment truly moved me. China is vast, so we can’t ensure every holder participates in each event, but I deeply hope that everyone sees Little Ghosts’ growth and feels proud. I can’t reveal much about our Web2 business plans this year, but I can say this: over the past year, we’ve validated our business model, and this year will be about scaling up. We’ll leverage more high-impact brands and pursue deeper Web2 commercial explorations. Rome wasn’t built in a day, but we believe Little Ghosts will evolve into a monster, growing at a speed unmatched by conventional IPs.
With the crypto market entering a bull phase, we’ll also launch many new initiatives in Web3. Rest assured, we’ll use MID as the gateway to our ecosystem, and we plan to expand MID integration across other blockchains, freeing our project from reliance on a single chain and enabling multi-chain development. Other Web3 plans remain under wraps for now—stay tuned.
We’re transforming Little Ghosts from a single IP into a full-fledged entertainment content ecosystem. Creating content, building platforms, and expanding channels are our core priorities. Our Web2 collabs and Web3 moves will act as amplifiers. I don’t believe ETH NFTs are dying. On the contrary, after this market cycle, I expect more projects to begin delivering real substance beyond emotional hype. Right now, it may seem like prices are reverting to intrinsic value—but in the future, I firmly believe value will catch up to price.
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@sleepy0x13
