GM

Semi last call to say GM back before 2023 ends.

Do the right thing.

Links for the Top 25 drops are HERE.

Three big NFT trends for 2024 

O Dearly Beloved, 

I entered my writing quarters this morning to find my Seeing Stone glowing in the dark. 

I reached for it and immediately fell into a trance where I witnessed thousands upon thousands of future worlds playing out in front of me.

Three visions stood out above all others. Here are those fever dream highlights. 

Curator Meta (affiliate fees)

Have you heard of mint.fun? They’re a mint aggregator that at one point was capturing 40% of all mint transactions on Ethereum. 

They can do this because protocols like Zora allow fragmented minting, which lets other platforms point to a single mint at the same time. 

And whoever captures the mint tx gets a small fee reward of 0.000444 ETH. That’s only $1, but it can scale pretty quickly with volume.

We’re now seeing this pop up in other apps like Floor and Rainbow, and more will follow. 

Eventually, it’ll just be assumed that new mints are available from your favorite app.

For now, only large platforms are participating, but tools like Reservoir are making it easier for individual creators to spin up their own versions of mint.fun. 

Imagine… a little guy like me, with his own minting platform. Abuela we made it. 

(more on why this is a big deal here)

Network Goods will be the surprise genre of the year

I bought a chair this year. Not just any chair – this was a one-of-a-kind algorithmically generated chair sold as an NFT. 

I still have it in token form, but if I wanted to I could turn it into a real sittable thing. 

Expect a lot more of this next year, from two angles: 

1. Generative Products

Randomized unique physical objects created at mint, similar to Art Blocks collections.

Example: 

• Luke Shannon’s chairs

• Snowfro’s Generative Goods

2. Embedded Products

Traditional physical items, but embedded with a chip that connects it to the blockchain.

Examples: 

• Pudgy Penguin plushies (tag not a chip)

• Weebox action figures 

• 9DCC

I predict there’s going to be at least one surprise hit physical collection in 2024. Sometimes people just need to hold something to make it feel real. 

Enforceable Royalties will come roaring back

This will be the biggest catalyst for NFTs next year. 

If you check the timeline stretching back to early 2021, you’ll see that we went through roughly 18 months with “enforced” royalties followed by another 18 months with zero royalties. 

And now we’re about to swing back dramatically. 

Most creators, when given the option, will always opt for royalties, and in retrospect that zero royalty period will look like a blip in an otherwise uninterrupted long-term arc. 

Remember: This used to be the defining pitch for new creators joining the space, and it’ll once again be used to encourage high-quality creators to return. 

It’ll also have a bunch of other cascading effects, some more predictable than others. 

Here’s one crazy example: free NFTs with enforceable royalties shared with minters (now possible with ERC-721C). Exciting, but also terrifying.