Crypto is cool, now get on the yacht
Investors gather in physical world to view virtual opportunities, party
NEW YORK >> The masters of the metaverse thousands of CryptoPunks and Bored Apes, artists and hackers, starry-eyed idealists and profit-hungry speculators descended on Manhattan this past week, looking for a glimpse of the future.
Officially, they were here for NFT.NYC, a conference devoted to the non-fungible token, or NFT, the blockchain-based collectible that has upended the cryptocurrency and art worlds this year. The conference, now in its third year, attracted a record crowd of 5,000, plus a 3,000-person waitlist, organizers said.
By day, they went to panels with titles like “Mainstreaming Blockchain Games” and “Fintech and NFTs: Risk and Regulation.”
But the real action happened at night, on the unofficial party circuit a weeklong orgy of boom-time exuberance that some attendees jokingly referred to as “Crypto Coachella.”
It was a coming-out party of sorts for the NFT community, which was born online and has only recently started to experiment with offline fun. On Sunday, the Bored Ape Yacht Club — an elite NFT clique whose members own a series of extremely expensive monkey cartoons — threw a rager on an actual yacht on the Hudson River. On Monday, partyers packed into VR World in midtown for a party DJed by an NFT collector named Seedphrase, who appeared on stage in a light-up CryptoPunk helmet. And Tuesday, entrepreneurs rubbed elbows with drag queens at a downtown party hosted by Playboy to promote the magazine’s new “Rabbitars” NFT collection.
It was a more diverse group than one might think, due primarily to the presence of plenty of artists and musicians among the crypto die-hards, FOMO-stricken investors and corporate suits. Many NFT collectors know each other only from Twitter threads and Discord chats, and few use their real names or photos online, opting instead for pseudonyms and cartoon avatars. At first, they spent a lot of time figuring out who they might know as CoolCat43 or ApeChad690 and whether the guy who came dressed as CryptoPunk #3706 actually owned CryptoPunk #3706. (He did.)
They also found that not all of the customs of the
online NFT world translate well to meatspace. Tshirts emblazoned with rallying cries like “Wagmi” (we’re all gonna make it) drew some confused stares from passersby. One morning, a group of NFT fans in Times Square struggled to start a chant of “gm, New York” “gm” being the traditional Twitter greeting of the crypto-converted. By the end, even Elmo looked embarrassed.
And forget about trying to explain to the uninitiated what an NFT conference is, or why you’d fly across the country to attend one. I overheard several attempts, mostly with polite waiters and bartenders, which almost always stalled out somewhere around the word “provenance.” The real answer for some of them “we buy digital tokens corresponding to JPEGs because digital tokens corresponding to JPEGs sometimes become incredibly valuable, and we are here because we want to figure out which digital tokens corresponding to JPEGs will become incredibly valuable next so that we can buy them and retire early” generally raises more questions than it answers.
I’m a fan of NFTs, but in some ways, they’re an odd fit for an IRL gathering. Like crypto itself, they’re a purely digital phenomenon a technology that allows people to buy and sell intangible fragments of the internet as if they were physical objects, whether it’s trading NBA highlight videos or auctioning off collections of digital art. And between the cringe factor of certain NFT subgroups and the prevalence of literal children among the NFT elite, it’s a scene that could probably benefit from a little more mystique.
By Monday night, the VIPs who gathered at a reception on the roof of the Edison Hotel seemed to have worked it out. Snapping off their masks and flagging down trays of sliders and risotto balls, they caught each other up on their projects, and talked about how discovering NFTs had changed their lives.
Mostly, they seemed grateful to be in each other’s company.
“This, to me, is Woodstock,” said Kenn Bosak, a Philadelphia-based NFT collector, who had a small face tattoo that turned out, under close inspection, to be the letters NF-T. (“I got it the day I became a millionaire,” he explained.)
Woodstock which signified the mainstream embrace of a youthful counterculture is actually a decent comparison to a gathering like NFT.NYC, albeit on a different scale. The crypto business is booming, with Bitcoin and Ethereum prices near all-time highs and new money arriving by the truckful.