I recently tweeted about a 10 question survey that asked people a broad range of questions on the NFT ecosystem. I will go through each question and explain my findings. Here were the 10 questions.
How many months/years have you been in the NFT ecosystem?
What is the most you have spent on a single NFT (in $USD)?
How much do you expect to spend on NFTs in the next 12 months?
Which NFT category is your favorite?
Why is that category your favorite?
What are the primary venues that you buy and sell NFTs on? (OpenSea, SuperRare, etc)
What is one product/service that the NFT space needs?
Currently, the total amount traded in the NFT market has been ~$140m. What will this number be 12 months from now?
To date, the highest sale price of a single NFT was ~$120,000. What amount will be the highest sale of a single NFT within the next 12 months?
Hardest question yet - Why do you buy NFTs? (Investment purpose, fun, social, etc)
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1. How many months/years have you been in the NFT ecosystem?
This was a straightforward question that had surprising results. I expected there to be more respondents that had been involved with NFTs for less than 1 year and fewer respondents that have been involved for +3 years. I also think my personal network (people that would follow me on Twitter, see me tweet about this survey AND actually do the survey) is skewed towards people that have been in the space for a long time so that could be affecting results.
2. What is the most you have spent on a single NFT (in $USD)?
These results weren’t that surprising to me because I know most people in the NFT space spend $1,000s of dollars on assets because NFTs tend to be expensive. I am excited to do another survey a year from now and see if people are spending more or less on single NFTs
3. How much do you expect to spend on NFTs in the next 12 months?
This is where the survey results get wild. The majority of respondents are looking to spend at least $10,000 in the ecosystem. That is a serious amount of money but I think when you factor in that almost all of the users in the NFT ecosystem are also crypto investors it makes more sense. Purely being goods worth $10,000 seems excessive but when you factor in that this is part of their “investing” capital it makes more sense that it is such a high amount. People are expecting to earn a return from the money “spent” (invested) in the NFT ecosystem.
4. Which NFT category is your favorite?
For the sake of simplicity I categorize NFTs into the following buckets:
Collectibles: Assets with little to no utility. CyyptoKitties, CryptoPunks, etc
Game Assets: Assets with high levels of utility within their universe. Axie Infinity, Gods Unchained, etc
Virtual Land: Part social, e-commerce, gaming, and creative platforms all rolled into one. Decentraland, Cryptovoxels, Somnium Space, etc.
Crypto Art: Art that has been tokenized on a blockchain.
Other: Insurance, property titles, domain names, IP, etc
It was not surprising to me that most respondents favored art but I was surprised that virtual land, game assets, and collectibles were so even. I thought there would be more clearly favorable categories.
5. Why is that category your favorite?
These answers were very broad so I attempted to bucket them into rough categories.
Game/Play/Use: You can actually “use” the NFTs in some fashion, they do not just sit passively in your wallet.
Evolution in art: These respondents discussed how NFT art was a game-changer for the art world and how NFTs are perfect for digital artwork.
Love of collecting: Most people that chose this answer referred to their love of collecting as to why a specific NFT was their favorite.
Community/Social/Connection: These respondents would explain that the community and social connections are what really drove them to love a specific NFT project.
VR worlds are the future: Many people referenced the metaverse or how virtual worlds are multi-purpose platforms of the future.
Investment upside: This is self-explanatory but people that chose this answer liked specific NFT projects because they thought it has the greatest potential for a return.
6. What are the primary venues that you buy and sell NFTs on? (OpenSea, SuperRare, etc)
Note: “Native” refers to a marketplace that is built into a game/platform. Examples are the Axie Infinity marketplace or the CryptoKitties marketplace.
7. What is one product/service that the NFT space needs?
This question was difficult to turn into simple data points because the answers were so broad. I categorized the 89 responses into rough categories that I will explain below the pie chart.
Markets - 22.5% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
NFT Sharding
Greater liquidity
Centrzlied NFT exchange
Reputation system for marketplaces
Improved features for identifying fakes
Lower marketplace fees
Customer service support
Easy fiat on/offramps
Data/Information - 15.7% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
Better data insights
Artist glossary
NFT valuation
Leaderboards for projects but also within projects.
Finance - 15.7% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
NFT Lending
NFT Rentals
NFT Insurance
NFT Index
Useability - 13.5% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
More ways to use NFTs
More ways to view/display NFTs
More Games using NFTs
NFT Tech - 11.2% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
Cross-chain transfer of NFTs
Dynamic NFTs
More composable NFTs
Blockchain - 5.6% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
Scalability
Lower gas fees
Interoperability
Wallets/onboarding - 4.5% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
Not having to use Metamask
Not having to remember seed phrase
Username and password onboarding
Direct messaging buyer/seller - 4.5% of respondents
This question is straightforward but it just means users want to be able to direct message each other on exchanges.
Education - 3.4% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
Crypto onboarding explainers
NFT explainers
Crypto art explainers
Overall better educational resources for the ecosystem
Community/project management - 3.4% of respondents
This category including people asking for things like:
Better community management tools/features
Better project management tools/features
8. Currently, the total amount traded in the NFT market has been ~$140m. What will this number be 12 months from now?
Most users in the NFT ecosystem see trade volume increasing by 2-3x but there is a cluster of users that think it’s possible to see extremely large growth over the next year, around 10x growth.
9. To date, the highest sale price of a single NFT was ~$120,000. What amount will be the highest sale of a single NFT within the next 12 months?
There is a cluster of respondents that think we will see the highest sale price roughly double to $240,000 but a very large portion of respondents said over $1,000,000 which was surprising.
10. Why do you buy NFTs? (Investment purpose, fun, social, etc)
The 104 respondents could choose multiple answers for this question.
The most common combination was “investment” and “fun”. Obviously “fun” is a very broad category but I thought it was interesting seeing it paired with “investment.” Usually, investing decisions are based on hard facts and math but when you invest for fun it changes the dynamics and takes some of the pressure off. The large number of respondents that chose “fun” might have done so because NFTs are visual assets that people can use in games or collect for enjoyment. Most other investable assets are just numbers on a screen so I think compared to traditional markets, NFTs will proportionally have larger amounts of users investing in them for “fun.” This is just a theory but will be exciting to watch play out over the next few years.
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Golden survey. Many current initiatives inclusive of new product releases, research or emerging use cases would be refined using the statistics of survey.