The Final Chapter and New Birth of NFT: From Bubble Burst to Reshaping IP Value

The last vestige of heat in the NFT market dissipated with the token issuance of Pudgy Penguins. Recently, the token issuance of Doodles on the Solana chain only caused a few ripples. Yuga Labs continues to contract, and this time even involves their most core IP asset, Cryptopunks. The Bitcoin NFT projects that once held significant positions during the last wave of NFT revival are now nearly at zero. The concepts and narratives that once drove people crazy have now faded into obscurity, and no one is paying attention anymore.

The initial vision of the 10,000 PFP( personal avatars) NFT project is beautiful. They aim to create a moderately sized community to promote an IP globally in a bottom-up manner. This sharply contrasts with the traditional IP model, which requires a large initial investment to produce content. Taking Disney's Marvel Universe, Star Wars, and various animated characters as examples, these IPs often require years of accumulation and huge investments to resonate deeply with people and ultimately become a gold mine.

In contrast, the entry barrier for NFTs is extremely low, allowing for the rapid creation of IPs and their assetization. Creators only need to pay a small gas fee to sell their works on platforms like OpenSea, without the support of galleries, toy companies, film companies, or any professional teams, enabling them to create a new IP and establish a new artist.

Three to four years ago, we witnessed some bottom-up IPs becoming popular in the top entertainment circles of Europe, America, Japan, and South Korea. Ordinary artists can also achieve a rise from obscurity through NFTs. For Z-generation individuals like me, who grew up watching Japanese anime, being able to participate in IP investment and incubation, which was previously hard to access, through cryptocurrency is an exciting thing.

However, as projects like BAYC began to "madly nest dolls", and Azuki launched the disastrous sub-series Elemental, the positioning of NFTs gradually became clear. It is not a form of equity or investment, but rather more like an expensive luxury item with accompanying membership benefits. The project parties hope that users will continuously purchase sub-series to provide financial support for the roadmap to build the value of the IP core later on. This contradictory seed was thus planted: the project parties know that creating content is costly, but without a content IP, they will die. Releasing sub-series every few months continuously consumes the interests of the original series holders, tormenting every member of the community. Waiting for content to bring returns may take years, or it may never come at all. The divide began to widen, beautiful fantasies shattered with the drop in floor prices, leaving only various disputes.

If we consider NFTs as luxury trend toys for Generation Z, the reasons for their rise and fall become clearer. In this era of fast food culture, a lack of content support is not necessarily a bad thing, as the appearance alone can quickly attract buyers. For example, the artistic style of Azuki aligns well with Asian aesthetics, and under this consensus, this grassroots NFT series has been able to follow closely behind BAYC to become the third largest blue-chip project. Well-known trendy toys in the real world, such as Bearbrick(, the B.Duck little yellow duck, and Molly, also lack content support, yet they became wildly popular due to their unique appearances.

However, trends are always fleeting. Without content as the core value, these IPs may become outdated at any time. Limited by the cultural atmosphere of the cryptocurrency circle and the reality of the extremely low success rate of NFT projects, project parties often keep launching derivatives around a single IP. But the reality is that by the time the core has not yet taken shape, this trend has already passed.

Of course, there are also some PFP projects with ample content support, such as Japanese-style NFTs. In the past, I have encountered at least four or five projects with well-known Japanese anime IPs that hope to make a mark in the NFT market. However, they seem to have not considered that the fan base of the IP is almost completely incompatible with the NFT circle. Secondly, there are already so many peripheral products related to Japanese anime that it's difficult to choose; why would fans spend hundreds of times the price to buy a small image? The key point is that this small image is just an image, and the future application space is almost zero. Even if you purchase a high-end NFT, you can only gain access to the "SIDE-G" entry of the Gundam metaverse. The profits Bandai earns from models, games, and animations naturally have nothing to do with you, and the NFT community may even be seen as an outlier among the entire Gundam fan base. In this regard, the dilemmas faced by GameFi projects are also very similar.

At this point, the PFP project has become a false proposition, with only the pragmatic spark of the little penguin continuing to strive. So, do these little images have another way out? I believe PoP MART may provide a different answer.

![Issuing coins is not the goal: The conclusion and restart of NFT])https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-cec01cfeb01e4dc1413d9d0ce0d1851e.webp(

This small store originating from the Beijing Euro-American Shopping Center turned around by代理Sonny Angel. This single series contributed nearly 30% of PoP MART's sales at the time. The envious copyright holders reclaimed the exclusive agency rights a year later, but this move instead led to the birth of an IP empire.

The founder of PoP MART, Wang Ning, had a very simple idea at the time: to create proprietary IP that could not be taken away by others. In 2016, PoP MART collaborated with Hong Kong designer Wang Xinming to launch the first independent trendy toy series, Molly. This pouting little girl quickly became popular nationwide, and through the uncertainty stimulation of the blind box gameplay and dopamine drive, PoP MART began its first round of rapid growth. By 2019, the annual sales of the single IP Molly had reached 456 million yuan, becoming PoP MART's core source of revenue at that time.

This model that combines Japanese gashapon with high-end trendy toys for collaboration has also become quite common during the NFT boom in the following years. Basic elements designed by artists are then combined by the project team into a series of images for sales and operations. NFTs typically adopt a blind box format during the initial launch phase, with the project team releasing various rare combinations of images to stimulate players' purchasing desire.

The two differ only in their release formats, but tens of thousands of NFT projects and various blue-chip projects have generally failed. Why is PoP MART experiencing a second spring now?

I used to attribute the reasons to difficulties in landing and high purchasing thresholds. The former does indeed have issues from the current perspective, but the latter is not the case. NFTs also went through a grassroots project phase of Free Mint) free minting(, with Goblintown and MIMIC SHHANS being star projects of that era, where creators made a fortune just from transaction fees. Many NFTs in the inscription era have even further decentralized, but this has not prevented the decline of NFTs. It is very easy to form or join an IP community, but the challenge lies in how to sustain it.

Therefore, I think there might be a problem with our model. After the first round of rapid growth, Molly did not make PoP MART a huge success; the company's stock price, like the NFT, has been declining from 2021 all the way to 2024. However, PoP MART eventually turned profitable, relying on a whole wall of IPs. Now, PoP MART has 12 proprietary IPs including Molly, DIMOO, BOBO&COCO, YUKI, and Hirono, and 25 exclusive IPs including Labubu), PUCKY, and SATYR RORY, along with over 50 non-exclusive co-branded IPs with Harry Potter, Disney, League of Legends, and others.

People's preferences are always unpredictable, the lifecycle of an IP is limited, but what if I have hundreds of choices? Nowadays, Labubu is very popular in Europe, America, and Southeast Asia, and the value retention ability of its surrounding dolls can be called "plastic Moutai". The ideals of Yuga Labs have ultimately been realized in the Web2 domain, and all of this is not a coincidence.

We need to rethink what the IP business is, what the development roadmap for NFTs is, and why PoP MART has achieved such high success despite the lack of content support?

The success of Pudgy Penguins lies in practicality, practicality, or practicality. The NFT itself is difficult to differentiate technically; no matter how cleverly designed the minting process is, it ultimately remains a JPG image. The real challenge of NFTs lies in the realization of IP, which is hundreds of times more difficult than producing 10,000 PFPs. Yuga Labs wants to create a metaverse, and Azuki wants to produce anime. These ideas are cool, but these projects, with costs starting in the hundreds of millions, will only seek funding support from community members.

This highly compressed world is too restless, and everyone is eager for quick success. Holders want to make big money, while project teams want to achieve instant success. Almost no blue-chip projects are willing to humble themselves, and ultimately the more impatient they are, the harder they fall. The original team of Pudgy Penguins was also a restless grassroots team, and after their reputation was damaged, they sold the little penguin project at a low price.

At this moment, the little penguin finally met its true owner, Luca Netz. This practitioner with many years of experience in physical marketing has brought the little penguin back to its rightful height. Luca Netz is genuinely building a brand; he operates a company for NFT holders. From marketing to plush toys, and to future games, every step of the little penguin is solid, allowing the company to be profitable and the holders to profit as well. There is nothing particularly special about this; it is simply doing what it is supposed to do. It has been proven that bottom-up IP can exist in Web3, but there are simply too many project parties who cannot lower their stance.

Therefore, I really dislike the term "falsification", as if certain things should never have existed. Electric vehicles were once clumsy, and Siri on my phone was also quite awkward. But this does not prevent the entire city from being filled with electric vehicles with green license plates today, and the development of artificial intelligence goes without saying.

Many so-called debunked tracks will still be attempted by Web3 in the future, but it lacks a suitable project party.

The path to success is simple, yet also very difficult. The next stop for PFP will eventually need to break free from some of the inherent logical frameworks of cryptocurrency, and to become the next Web3 version of Disney requires significant accumulation. I have discussed in previous articles whether the scarcity of NFTs has been counterproductive in the process of becoming more mainstream. If it is defined as a trendy consumer product, then a limited edition of 10,000 might be too few; if it is defined as a unique asset and fundraising method in Web3, then IP ultimately still needs to be transformed into physical consumer products to fulfill commitments to the community, rather than a bunch of strange sub-series.

Given the unique culture of the cryptocurrency space and the attributes of NFTs themselves, it is quite helpless to hold onto an IP without letting go. How can we further innovate based on these PFPs? How can we expand a project into an IP factory? This may require us to embrace some new concepts and introduce more technologies and gameplay.

What is the significance of issuing tokens for NFTs? I still do not understand. This situation seems more like an exploitation of the lower ranks by those in power, as well as a dilution of the original value of the NFT. I can only understand it as the project looking for a convenient way to exit liquidity.

From APE to DOOD, they are all variants of air coins without exception. The rights they confer often include the ability to stake for some on-chain transaction dividends, purchase rights for items in the metaverse, governance rights, and so on. Ideally, it is a perfect cycle among the holder → staker → developer. However, in reality, it resembles a kind of air, trapped in a vicious cycle of falling NFT prices, declining mining yields, and decreasing token prices.

For original NFT holders, although the tokens have taken away some dividends and rights, most of them will also receive a large airdrop during the token generation event (TGE), so no one complains. However, in the long run, as mentioned earlier, this is a kind of dilution, and the distribution method like Azuki's Anime is even a blatant plunder.

Short-term hype is important, but the long-term existence of the project is even more crucial; do not let the issuance of tokens be the final stop.

In this fast-paced, dopamine-driven era, I