The Post-NFT Era: Reflections on Greed, Hype, and the Crumbling of an Empire

The title of this article is probably what caught your attention but I promise this is worth your click. I have spent the last couple of hours thinking about NFTs as a veteran who is now witnessing the post-NFT era. How quickly they came and left the scene! 

Is it any surprise that these days you hardly find the mention of NFT in a crypto news article  or on the front pages of crypto media? In the last crypto winter when NFTs dominated the headlines and were one of the most Google-searched word on the internet. As a matter of fact, Collins dictionary named NFT as the word of the year in 2021, adding it as one of its latest entries. 

However, the sun has finally set for NFTs. After all, YugaLabs, one of its most popular proponents, recently handed over its stake in its iconic NFT collection, the crypto punks, which at some point was the NFT gold standard, the emperor of the NFT empire, if you will.

I remember that longing to own a vast collection of NFTs and like everyone else who went down the rabbithole, I was lost in the hype. I was on every NFT Discord server imaginable , filling every whitelist form that came my way. Those who remember these events would now realise what a vicious cycle it was !

In restrospect, I now hold the believe that there was an undercurrent of human greed at play. Because how could millions of people become so disillusioned to the point where you had to scramble for an NFT in the hope of becoming rich and financially stable?

NFTs were not inherently bad ideas but the problem was that they were snake oil sold by expert salesmen and charllartans , who made millions off the people they fed so many lies about future projections leveraging on such sophisticated psychological tools as FOMO (Fear Of Missiing Out), and FUD(Fear Uncertainty, Doubt).

It was an insane brainwashing , and while it lasted, millions of people were investing in a piece of digital fanfare artwork which, by some very alien calculation, was going to the moon.

In my post-NFT reflection, I remember NFT projects such as Pyramid DAO, CardaLordz, Dudez, and a host of other utterly meaningless and scammy NFTs. Take Pyramid DAO, for instance.

It was an NFT project on Discord rooted in the sham of raising millions of dollars to build the tallest pyramid that would make the Pyramid of Giza green with envy. It was a lie well-told and the price I paid for my naivety was $11 worth of a badly designed sick-looking pyramid NFT ! 

In the world of NFT scams and scandals, one name stood taller above many others: SEAN CURT. Sean was the founder of CardaLordz, an scammy NFT project that exploited the religious and superstitious beliefs of its investors.

Every trace of this project has largely disappeared from the internet and the mastermind, whose last known location was somewhere in Florida, has found a safe lodgement behind Google's algorithm.

I knew Sean Curtz like the back of my palm. I wrote some aticles about Cardalordz, his project, and watched in utter shock how he rugged gullible investors who bought his fancy pictures of religious figures. On the day CardaLordz was officially launched on Cardano in 2021, it sold-out in minutes and many potential buyers had to be white-listed again.

The website shut down twice and and after a day or two, the floor price fell like a steriod hitting the earth. Everyone who bought the digital rendering of their favourites historical and religious figures had been scammed!

As I began to process what had happened, I recieved a call from a private American investigator, who had been on Sean Curt's trail. It was this mysterious man that pointed me in the direction of Curt's criminal record, which I pulled off from the internet.

It occurred that in 2018 , a lawsuit was brought against Curt for defrauding American investors during the ICO boom, before he resurfaced again in 2021, when he re-engineered his scamming skills to launch CradaLordz. 

The crypto world is full of many Curts whose fraudulent acts continue to overshadow the technological marvel that blockchain and cryptocurrency represent. It has taken the slow and painful death of NFTs or its total obliteration in crypto sphere to realise that 99% of the use case for NFT thrived on blantant lies and brainwashing.

It was better as a tool of cordination and not as a means to a material end. And it is coming back not as an NFT but as a more dignified digital token with a cryptographically sound purpose. Can we now observe a one minute silence for NFTs?