The Case against Zombie NFTs, or how I started to Discard them for Perpetual Convivialities—The Rise & Proliferation of IPNFTs & SBTs: Part I
This piece was first deployed to Mirror on Optimism, & Paragraph on Polygon.
The majority of usual, & premium mediocre NFTs are not even candidates for zombie media in the sense of infrastructural obsolescence. Some observers within, or from without, the expanded crypto-economics culture protocol sandboxes that some care to designate as communities are right: NFTs are dead.
The dead, or rather zombie, in this case are those generalized mediocre experiments solely at the semi-quantifiable narrative-driven behavioral markets that merely extract value from the greater open finance and commons vistæ of blockchain-enabled societies where plays on the limitations of emergent technologies ranging from governance to mere storage define our next moves towards rich protocol enshrinement via the cross-pollination of accessibility to masses without any value hijacker in-between.
Except for some innovative, & insightful smart contractual, communal, & hyperstitional experiments around & through the non-fungibles; majority of frothies, that is, NFTs from 2019-2022, are just huge chunks of unnecessary storage load across mainly IPFS nodes that are constantly re-purposed towards fungibilities that are again wrapped, staked, chopped & served. It is at times better than Ancient Greek drama to witness how we explore the drama across their conceptualizations as Deleuze would love it.
However, all the experiments in & through this sandbox have recently given rise to a certain types of NFTs that keep thriving thanks to protocol level coordination among the expanded Ethereum community, developers, thought leaders, and the core.
IPNFTs consists of three parts: a smart, & a separate legal contract alongside the metadata. These type of NFTs are popular among decentralized science (DeSci) launchpads, & communities where the contract can be repurposed to the needs of any scientific endeavor that needs either funding, or a community around it. There was a recent editorial call on the Nature Biotech on the reasons why scientists need to embark upon the per block time spaceship.
From the vantage point of scientific non-fungible protocols, the royalty and intellectual property mayhem that feeds the drama among especially NFT X (the artist formerly known as Prince), & CT (ain’t no way Ima call it CX) seems trivial; however, I think it is also a drama that nurtures novel IP protocols, and infrastructure so that scientific coordination plays do not fall into the thirst trap of faux-arts that drove the first NFT bubble up into the mainstream.
When combined with Soul-bound tokens (SBTs), such emergent utility cases in NFTs as in the case of DeSci IPNFTs will create better info institutions in the larger crypto-cultures ecosystem diagrams.
Considering that account abstraction technology will keep thriving alongside programmability of fee market mechanism designs, and new governance forums of like-minded individuals garnering their sovereignty from a first privacy-by-design rails as exponentiated by the ultimate transparency of the collectives to which they are a contributor; we might as well admit that we are in a transitioning phase from mere value-extractor NFT markets into idea markets onchain whose market intelligence can be programmatically wrapped, and staked into abstract real world asset (RWAs) classes such as patents in pharmaceuticals, senescence studies, and the more—so that even dead media—by transmogrifying into the modular digital objects that breathe in life such as IPNFTs—can bring more into our lives.