The current state of the market
The money printing and frivolous debt availability over the past years has caused an increase in inflation and arguably the markets dropping since the U.S. Fed became hawkish on Nov 21. It appears all ‘doom and gloom’ as we watch the crypto market cap dive from over $3tril to less than just $1tril and the past ten months wiping Total Value Locked (TVL) by approximately $130bil. Most coins are down over 95%.
Data shows that there is still demand for NFTs, and but looking at volume in $ value might not be the best indicator considering that cryptocurrencies are down affecting the $ value trading which is seen in Figure 1:
The weekly trade volume has drastically been reduced since the markets turned for the worse in july. In Figure 2, we can see NFT trading volume broken into their respective chains. We can see the same trend.
Despite the bear market taking it’s toll, statistics show that NFT marketplace peer-to-peer activity is higher this year than last in terms of users even though the market was peaking in Aug 2021. This is an excellent indicator that shows there is still demand for NFTs.
Launching your NFT project in a bear market might actually be a good idea, if you have true utility. Here is why:
- There is less competition, its easier to stand out
- Easier to collab with big project and influencers, again due to less competition
- The majority of the NFT market will notice you if you present something unique, there is not as much noise from hundreds of other projects stealing the attention.
- Cost of outsourcing has decreased as it is more difficult for services to find clients.
Right now, we believe that the NFT market is in a transistionary phase, where quality is important. The low effort utilities and marketing will no longer be sufficient and in the coming months we will see alot more innovation in the NFT space, as projects no longer feel the FOMO to get to market as fast as possible. Most founders will take their time to deliver quality by making their project unique, enhanced branding and storytelling.
We also have big names publicly speaking on the same observations such as the Ryan Selkis, the CEO of one of the world’s largest data analytics and research company. This is a time for quality rather than quantity. Bear markets have their place ‘Bear markets are good for cleaning house – Messari CEO’.
Now that you are brought up to speed on the market and our observations, this article will enlighten NFT projects how they should consider to deploy effectively—methods and considerations for reducing costs and emphasizing marketing.
- How to set your project up for success
When your team is researching which chain consider the following metrics:
- Layer 1 & 2 activity. There are plenty of dead chains out there, and the last thing your engineers and team want is to put hard work into their pride and joy, only to see nobody use it. So naturally, it is important to research where development and retail excitement. When you look into a chain, determine the number of unique contributing developers, number of active wallets, integrations, transactions, and their size.
- DeFi, we referenced a link earlier for looking at TVL, DeFiLlama.com. Another to consider is DAppradar.com. With these DApps, you can look at NFT activity, active wallets and TVL.
- If you have a Gaming DApps, check for active players, Transactions for token and in-game NFTs, transactions per user, and Guild activity.
- Analyzing the volume and value data in NFT marketplaces’ sales is crucial. It can help determine the demographic and narrative for specific chains and whether your project meets the narrative or demand.
- Web3 marketing during the winter to utilize existing platforms.
Considering that volume in ter has decreased and there is more risk during these market conditions, it is important to utilize what options are cost-effective, mainly if the marketing budget is scarce.
- Rockstars in crypto. The core team are the rockstars of crypto, particularly the technical staff. The technical staff, commonly known as ‘developers’, generate as much hype as your favourite music artists by simply talking about some of the innovations you and your team are creating and how. Display your team, their skills and their experience where you can.
- Community expectations. It is also essential to understand that in the Web3 space, there is an expectation that the community you create gets some collective face time with the core team. Whether the platform is Twitter Spaces, Discord fireside chats, or Telegram, each platform has its strength and effectively instills confidence within your community.
- Customer reviews. immensely popular in the Web2 space but not the Web3. Customers want to see genuine reviews of products and services from real people. This is a hurdle for the Web3 space, considering that a lot of the community likes to remain anonymous.
- Blog posts & updates. Every website should have a form of a blog with detailed information on product, updates, announcements, or community board-related items. Blogs are an excellent tool for SEO. Medium.com is an excellent and free tool for creating blogs.
- Roadmaps are an excellent tool that compliments your current community and gets potentially new clients or community excited and involved with your team’s long term vision. It can also be freely displayed on your website. You will find that your community will begin marketing it themselves on their social media accounts.
All the above are forms of marketing that can be done for free or at a meager cost. Additionally, it is our experience that the above methods are how you create a core community. A community that you actively connect with and want to see the company’s vision succeed
- Riskier forms of Web3 marketing and user acquisition
Web3 is unique in the different forms of strategies of marketing. However, these forms have also had adverse effects which is why we deem them riskier.
Airdrops. Token airdrops have become a common strategy in Web3 to attract new users. A project “airdrops” (or distributes) free tokens to recipients who have satisfied specific requirements or carried out certain tasks indicating protocol usage into their cryptocurrency wallet addresses. A well-executed airdrop to a well-considered group of recipients can draw in high-quality users, thank the community for its efforts, and assist projects make sure they have an active and cohesive group from day one, presuming you thought through the tokenomics and underlying utility of the token. While there have been many successful airdrops (such as Uniswap and Ethereum Naming Services), there are also certain drawbacks and dangers for projects with airdrops. As airdrops take place on-chain, there aren’t many trustworthy and reliable ways for a project to proceed. Some of the risks associated:
- Sybil attackers and airdrop farmers who exploit the system to obtain disproportionate airdrop allocations
- Uninterested users who may not be knowledgeable about the token utility or dedicated to the protocol’s development
Tokens are frequently dumped right away, leading to price crashes and harm to the ecosystem as a whole. This happens when there is not enough “buy-in” from the token recipients (as is the case with token sales) or when there is not enough existing widespread faith in the protocol. Optimism and Ribbon Finance are two instances of airdrops that went horribly wrong.
Instead of airdropping to misaligned users who dump tokens at the first chance, projects launching tokens will need to validate users’ on-chain reputation and concentrate on users with a track record of contributing to protocols if they want airdrops to be successful in the bear market.
Bounties and credentials. Launching incentive-based rewards campaigns on bounty platforms, which reward users with cryptocurrency when they execute certain value-add on-chain actions, is another rising well-liked Web3-native user acquisition method (i.e. trade, stake, swap, lend, follow on social, etc). It offers brand-new users an opportunity to make cryptocurrency while gaining knowledge and credentials to work on up-and-coming ventures. It is a method for finding and hiring quality contributors for Web3 projects based on their credentials and value-adding activities.
You are paying to onboard users who have previously displayed value-add activities or positive on-chain behavior instead of paying Facebook or Google to capture whatever minimal search traffic is still present in the bear market. This demographic is significantly more likely to stay engaged and contribute to the network. Some reward platforms to research are:
- Develop a strategy for your content to stand out from the rest.
The unknown terrifies people. Most people are programmed to avoid situations that induce anxiety, uncertainty, or doubt.
Education is the remedy for such fear. As marketers in a field with a sordid history of theft and fraud, we are compelled to use high-quality content and thought leadership to show our customers the true value that Web3 products enable. And the crypto winter is the best and most efficient time to achieve this.
In a bear market, producing meaningful content for your target audience will help your project gain organic traffic, build trust, improve its SEO, and increase its brand value. Due to the vast volume of material being produced and shared in the bull market, it is quite challenging to distinguish out with original content. There is a lot less content being produced during a bear market, which makes it much simpler to persuade people to read your content and position your project as the go-to item and thought leader in your industry.
And keep in mind that Google decides what content to serve based on the timeliness of your articles, podcasts, newsletters, and tweets. It’s possible that information published during the last bull run is no longer relevant. Additionally, crypto fans that are in it for the long haul will continue check Twitter and refresh their feeds a dozen times a day, giving your material lots of opportunities to stand out, regardless of what is happening in the sector or how much value is lost.
Putting money into content during a bear market will yield enormous returns during the following bull market. Which businesses failed during the bear market and which initiatives remained active and prominent in people’s minds are always remembered. You might never face less competition and Web3 might never be as small as it is right now.
