NBA Top Shots allows basketball fans to collect the on-court video highlights (“moments”) of their favorite professional basketball players. Basketball is a passion for millions of people, and NFTs give fans a deeper connection to the action. I’m personally most excited about authentic NFTs created directly by creators (like the ones mentioned above)) but Top Shots has proven there’s a market for IP-based NFTs too. The belief in these stories appears to be growing as well.

Cryptopunks is known as the OG NFT project. Matt Hall and John Watkinson launched it based on 8-bit vintage design back in June 2017 well before NFTs were cool. They minted 10,000 punks with various traits and gave them away for free. Cryptopunk 7804 recently sold for 4200 ETH and the cheapest you can buy a punk for today is ~21 ETH (~$38K). More people are believing the Cryptopunks story over time.

Robbie Barrat is an early pioneer in utilizing Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create digital artworks. His open-source code was famously copied and used by a group who sold it at a traditional art auction for $432K. But the authentic implementation of his code is AI Generated Nude Portrait #1 on SuperRare. Robbie is a true artist who has largely stayed away from the recent NFT hype, but has a compelling story to those deeply interested in art.

Beeple has been grinding for 13+ years creating digital art that people love. Last year he started tokenizing his culturally aware artwork on Ethereum and that artwork is now worth over $100M. His EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS piece recently sold for $69M at a Christie’s auction. More people are believing Beeple’s story.

3LAU is an independent electronic music artist who has built a 10 year+ career in music doing shows and putting out music on the internet. Here’s an interview we did in October 2020. Since then, he dropped an NFT-based album that sold for over $11M. His authentic approach to connecting with fans combined with his great music is making more and more people believe his story.

Web3 is best under­stood as a game, or a game of games. I don’t intend that as a dig: it’s a really good game! Vast and open-ended, deeply social, with lots of scores to tally … AND you can win real money?? I mean, that’s terrific.

The highest revenue NFT project to date, NBA Top Shot, has generated $200M in gross sales in just the past month while spending very little on marketing. It’s been able to grow so efficiently because users feel like owners — they have skin in the game. It’s true peer-to-peer marketing, fueled by community, excitement, and ownership. 

Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like V-Bucks with NFTs/virtual goods like skins. Someday every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect.

Games such as The Sims Series, and Second Life are designed to be non-linear and to depend on collective intelligence for expansion. This way of sharing is gradually evolving and influencing the mindset of the current and future generations.[117] For them, collective intelligence has become a norm.

The UNU open platform for "human swarming" (or "social swarming") establishes real-time closed-loop systems around groups of networked users molded after biological swarms, enabling human participants to behave as a unified collective intelligence.[140][141] When connected to UNU, groups of distributed users collectively answer questions and make predictions in real-time.[142] Early testing shows that human swarms can out-predict individuals.[140] In 2016, an UNU swarm was challenged by a reporter to predict the winners of the Kentucky Derby, and successfully picked the first four horses, in order, beating 540 to 1 odds.

The idea of collective intelligence also forms the framework for contemporary democratic theories often referred to as epistemic democracy.

People use tags to aid classification, mark ownership, note boundaries, and indicate online identity. Tags may take the form of words, images, or other identifying marks. An analogous example of tags in the physical world is museum object tagging. People were using textual keywords to classify information and objects long before computers. Computer based search algorithms made the use of such keywords a rapid way of exploring records.