To be fair, the big NFT projects actually did reward their early loyal holders pretty well.
@CyberKongz kicked off the token meta at insane levels. BAYC dropped MAYC (topped ~40e), BAKC (~10e).
@Memeland had VIP mints that ran from 5e to 40e , then Potatoz (~4e) and Captainz (~9e).
@Azuki gave Beanz (hit 5e), Elementals (~2e), and later
$ANIME.
If you got in early, you easily pulled 10e in value across airdrops at the peaks for most projects.
But timing was everything.
Buy BAYC over 100e? You’re probably still underwater even with all the drops, especially if you got common floors like most people. Same story across the board. Early holders got paid multiple times over and stayed loyal. The ones who FOMO’d in later? Not so much.
Then the bear market hit, the playbook changed completely. Celebs stopped flexing jpegs, mainstream interest evaporated. Blur killed royalties (one of the biggest original selling points for NFTs). Airdrop meta was never sustainable anyway, teams gotta pay salaries and run ops.
So projects had to pivot to survive. The only people still paying attention are the real believers. Maybe <1k per project without dangling another carrot.
Everyone else is just here trading the next flip to grow their ETH stack while the charts keep grinding lower.
The disconnect got ugly.
Azuki goes hard into TCGs, but most holders signed up for cool anime art, not card games. Pudgies pushing plushies and games… when their holders are mostly grown adults who just like flexing cute PFPs online.
Yet holders keep buying the stuff they don’t actually want, praying for the next big airdrop carrot.
Early loyalists feel the projects already over-delivered. Late buyers who bought the top feel like bagholders who got treated as customers instead of partners sharing in the upside.
Truth is somewhere in the middle.
The truth is the old NFT dream is mostly dead. Only a handful of projects are showing real strength without needing to bait with drops.
We can keep riding the majors or just trade the counter-trend rallies. There’s still money to be made either way.
Or we can just keep sinking money with no thought of being rewarded and enjoy the cool stuff being made.
i hear ppl say that projects need to "focus on the nfts" a lot. it's weak feedback because it implies that there's a successful blueprint for how to build a sustainable business off of "focusing on nfts" when the data clearly shows that there isn't.
therefore, i believe projects should play to their own strengths, write their own playbook, be clear about their path, and then holders can decide if they want to be along for the ride or not.
more thoughts below: