There is no other way to say it: the market has been in a nasty slump for months. Non-fungible token (NFT) sales peaked in January at US$4.7 billion, with more than 1 million unique buyers in the market. 1 Two months in a row since June, the number has fallen below US$1 billion. This trend is reflecting a broader crypto slump overall, and the weakening global economy and the fear of inflation and recession didn’t help either. Not so surprisingly, many “NFT artists” have disappeared now the easy money is no longer flowing into this space. Since there are no sales happening for me, I have had a lot of time to observe and rethink during this time, which might be just what I needed.
One of the few adjustments that I made is to stop meaningless “shilling.” Shilling is a term commonly used in the NFT space to describe “promoting/selling” your artwork to others. That in itself is not a bad thing. There are no agents representing artists in this decentralized world so the artists have to promote their own work. The reasons that I decided to “shill less” are two folds. First of all, the great majority of these “shill me” tweets are just scams for engagements. The real goal is to boost their own visibility on Twitter so hardly any sales come from these activities. Secondly, I am truly turned off by the arrangance, even juvenile, attitudes from many of these self-proclaim collectors. Why would any self-respecting artists respond to a tweet like: “Smoking weed, Shill me!” is beyond me.
The second adjustment that I made is rather exciting, actually. Instead of converting my traditional artworks into NFTs, I decided to challenge myself to create new NFT artworks using new technologies. This was the birth of my most recent NFT collection, Immortal Queens, which combined 3D modeling/rendering, 2D digital compositing, and AI in my creative process, and the result was very encouraging. I minted and listed the first piece from the collection this morning, and it was sold within 20 minutes before I finish my tweet about it.
I understand there is probably a lot of luck involved for this sale to happen so quickly, but, I can’t help but feel good about getting some positive results from my explorations and learnings from the past few months. I created a minting/listing schedule for this collection to release all the pieces at a slower pace. Hopefully, there will be more good news to share soon, fingers crossed!