Written by / Wei Yining Han Ling Xue Yongwei
Edited / Mao Shiyang
The rush to buy ice piers has continued to the NFT. On the overseas trading platform, the first batch of digital collections of ice piers released on February 12 was officially priced at $99, and the highest price was about 560,000 yuan when it changed hands. This batch of digital products that can only be seen online has been speculated at sky-high prices, behind which is the bubble of the NFT and meta-universe industries. Giants such as Tencent and Ali have also participated in this game.
Ice pier + meta-universe, hype maker steady profit?
Outside the arena, the Beijing Winter Olympics have not only belonged to Gu Ailing, Su Yiming and Wu Dajing, chasing the enthusiasm of the Winter Olympics, igniting a round of rushing to buy the ice piers of the Winter Olympic mascots, some for collection, some for Fenggao. Today, this craze extends to the metaverse known as the "end of human development".
Offline "piers" are difficult to find, and it is not easy to buy an NFT digital collection of ice piers online. On February 12, the digital blind box of the ice pier, officially authorized by the International Olympic Committee and produced by the meta-universe head company SandBox, launched the trading platform, priced at $99, limited to 500 pieces, and each person can purchase up to 5 pieces. It is worth noting that the digital blind box is not supported for purchase by users in China.
"Finance and Economics" weekly learned that on the trading platform, the real transaction price of this batch of ice pier digital collections is generally 700 to 2000 US dollars, and the quotation is more exaggerated, and the highest one even reaches 8888 US dollars (about 560,000 yuan) Sky price.
It is worth noting that after the first batch of hot sales, the official price of the second batch became higher. Trading platform nPlayWay announced that at 1 a.m. Beijing time on February 18, it will also release the legendary version of the Digital Collection of the Winter Olympics, and the official price has increased from the original $99 to $349, more than three times. But compared to the nearly twenty-fold increase when the hand changed hands, the official price increase is nothing.
According to nWayPlay, the ice pier in this digital blind box will become the image of an athlete, wearing a variety of sports equipment, there are different styles such as alpine skiing, steel frame snowmobiles, snowboarding, etc., and no matter which digital blind box is drawn, two versions of the official emblem of the Beijing Winter Olympics and a digital poster collection will be obtained.
In an 11-second video posted by nWayPlay, an ice pier pin on a ski spins around the screen, emitting a dazzling purple glow around it. Although it is only a digital collection and cannot really be worn on the body, the back is still designed like a real badge, with a realistic metal buckle.
Unlike the ice pier dolls sold in Wangfujing, Beijing, this digital collection is untouchable and unplayable, and only exists in the "meta-universe", and the power outage cannot be seen. But the advantage is that there is no counterfeiting, and in the metaverse world the ownership of the collection is guaranteed through NFTs (non-homogeneous tokens), and the holder barely has to worry about it being stolen.
The top-notch ice piers, coupled with the fiery concept of NFTs and metaversics, quickly heated up this market. So that as long as the NFT concept is rubbed, the user's expectation of the transaction price will be pulled up.
Caijing Tianxia magazine noted that on February 16, a Japanese woman engaged in NFT artwork creation released an NFT work by her 10-year-old daughter. This simple children's painting depicts a panda head in a square shape, a blue stripe symbolizing ice and snow on the face, and a red heart in the lower right corner. However, the holder labeled the price of $94.42, which is about 500 yuan.
In fact, the digital collection of the Winter Olympics and ice piers is not the first attempt to combine sports with NFTs. Since last year, the NBA has noticed this business opportunity, teaming up with game development team Dapper Labs to create the basketball-based NBA Top Shot. To date, the total sales volume of NBA Top Shot has exceeded 10 million, with a total transaction volume of more than $700 million.
The football scene is also obsessed with NFTs, with clubs introducing NFT fan tokens, which allow fans who hold tokens to gain exclusive access, VIP privileges, and even participate in some decisions, such as deciding on the wall decorations inside the team's locker room. Well-known football clubs Barcelona and AC Milan have launched fan tokens, and in just a few hours, the transaction volume has reached millions of dollars.
The fiery situation attracts giants to enter the game, hoping to explore channels for monetizing the IP in their hands through NFT. At present, Internet giants including Ali, Tencent, JD.com, etc. have entered the game.
Giant Tencent Ali tested the waters, and thousands of companies were hotly speculated
In fact, the underlying layer of NFT is still blockchain technology, before the ice pier NFT fire, the concept of NFT and metacosmity has long appeared in the niche industry of blockchain.
As an important infrastructure of the metaverse, through the uniqueness and irreplaceability of NFTs, things in the real world can be mapped into the metaverse. If the metacosm is a building in the virtual world, the NFT can be any item in the building, such as hanging pictures, tables, etc., which allows digital assets to circulate and trade in the virtual world (metacosm). For the average consumer, the metaverse is too far away, and NFTs can be their "stepping stone" into the metaverse.
"The metaverse is still only a conceptual stage, and NFTs have explored some application scenarios, but the prospects for subsequent development are not too clear." An NFT industry practitioner told Caijing Weekly that the head Internet technology giant is more likely to build an infrastructure application of meta-universe and NFT, which has attracted ali, Tencent, NetEase, and ByteDance.
At the end of June 2021, Ali launched a payment code skin NFT based on AntChain, which was limited to 8,000 copies of each NFT, and was snatched up as soon as it was issued. Subsequently, the official price of this batch of 10 Alipay points + 9.9 yuan of NFTs, the scalper purchase price on the second-hand platform was reached 500 yuan to 100,000 yuan, of which Dunhuang Feitian Skin NFT was speculated to 1.5 million yuan in disguise on the second-hand platform.
Subsequently, since the end of July, many of Tencent's business units have tested the water of NFTs. On July 30, QQ Music said that it would launch the "TME Digital Collection" NFT, and on August 9, Hu Yanbin's 20th anniversary vinyl NFT album "Monk" was launched, with a limited edition of 2001 copies and more than 40,000 reservations. In other tencent business units, including digital collectibles based on Tencent's video culture program "Thirteen Invitations", NFTs have been launched one after another, and they have also been snapped up.
According to the statistics of third-party agency NonFungible, the size of NFT transactions reached $14 billion in 2021, which is 1.3 times the total amount of global art auctions in 2019 before the epidemic of 10.57 billion US dollars, of which games and collectibles are the largest application markets for NFTs. This is also an important reason for the head Internet technology companies to compete to enter the NFT field. Among the more than a thousand companies, the technology giants represented by Ali, NetEase, Tencent and Byte may be the closest to the NFT application and trading market.
Internet giants and technology companies began to set off a tide of metacosm and NFT. According to statistics, in 2021 alone, more than a thousand companies will apply for meta-universe and NFT-related trademarks, and the total number of trademark applications will reach or even exceed 10,000.
In this regard, the above-mentioned NFT practitioners told the "Finance and Economics" weekly that other companies applying for the meta-universe trademark is completely a gimmick, rubbing the packaging of the concept of technology.
In fact, the metaverse and NFT are not a novel concept, and even in terms of technology, they are not as full of technology and mystery as advertised by the outside world. In the eyes of industry practitioners, the concentrated outbreak of metacosmity and NFT is a bit of a "new bottle of old wine".
In other words, the story here is easier to tell. It is also because of the close relationship between the metacosm and the NFT that many companies must be the first to be hyped up when packaging metaverse products. "The concept of the metaverse is too vain, NFT is the sharpest knife to cut leeks in the metaverse, which is why many companies use NFT to hype, get traffic and attention in a short period of time, and the company's value has doubled."
A person who is also engaged in NFT told Caijing Weekly that large manufacturers have technology and traffic, and there is room for NFT in the future, but in view of domestic regulations, what can be done at this stage is only art collection and games. Due to the need to denominate in renminbi, the size and depth are currently limited.
In August last year, Tencent launched the so-called first domestic NFT trading platform "Phantom Core", which is one of the few infrastructures for NFT trading. The platform mainly sells artists' joint digital artworks, but unlike foreign NFT trading platforms, Tencent's NFT trading product does not allow third parties to publish NFTs on the platform, which means that the launch of subsequent NFTs is officially led by IP authorized official productions, rather than users' own creations.
In addition, at present, the NFT projects of domestic Internet technology companies are focused on digital collectibles, and they are produced by the platform based on major IP, including existing music, paintings, video programs and other works, and users can only collect their NFT works, and cannot use token transfer and transaction.
But in the early days of the industry, under such restrictions, through the heat of capital, this game of chasing the metaverse still swept into other industries.
( On November 18, 2021, Zhangjiajie became the first scenic spot in China to set up a meta-universe research center, image source: Visual China)
Chasing bubbles?
In fact, some companies are rushing to register meta-universe trademarks for protective purposes. Zhu Junru, vice president of products and strategy at ByteDance, believes that the VR equipment headset company Pico applied for registration of the "Pico Metaco" mainly to prevent the Pico brand from being preemptively registered for the "Metaco" concept hype, which is a protective registration. Previously, the earliest applicant of "NetEase Cloud Meta universe" was not NetEase Cloud, but a technology company in Qingdao, which was internationally classified as a scientific instrument.
However, the hype is also hiding. Previously, after some listed companies registered meta-universe-related trademarks, the company's stock price rose to a limit. To this end, it attracted the close attention of the regulator, and sent an inquiry letter to many enterprises, asking for clarification on whether it was to "rub hot spots" by investing in the meta-universe industry.
Behind this surge in cybersquatting is the drive of capital. Since March last year, the concept stocks related to NFTs and metacosms have risen sharply, and many companies have not directly carried out NFT-related business, but as long as there is news that the company may be involved in NFT-related projects, the stock price may soar, and many related company executives have achieved "wealth freedom".
Caijing Magazine learned that the vast majority of these concept stocks have a market capitalization of less than $1 billion, and some are even less than $100 million.
This conceptual packaging naturally does not stand the test of the market. In November last year, after the People's Network "named" NFTs, domestic meta-universe-related concept stocks fell collectively. Among them, Tianxia Xiu fell to a halt, Jiachuang Video, Hengxin Oriental, Sichuan Network Media fell by more than 10%, and the sector fell by more than 4%.
A month or two before the People's Daily article, there were already signs of shareholders and executives of meta-universe concept stocks cashing out. According to media statistics, since September 2021, 14 of the 77 stocks in the meta-universe concept sector have issued plans to reduce their holdings by executives or actual controllers, and the maximum number of shares to be reduced is 357 million shares.
In fact, this cash-out situation is not only happening among company executives, many ordinary users buy special NFT collectibles, and then quickly resell them again at high prices. The ice pier NFT on sale this time, some users in the rush to buy, the first time at a price of more than ten times higher than the original price for the second time sold to other buyers.
Behind the "speculation", the market of NFT collectibles is extremely unstable, and it is prone to sharp rises and falls. On the other hand, under the pressure of supervision, the secondary transaction of domestic NFTs is restricted, and it is difficult to carry out free trading and circulation like foreign countries.
Due to the strict supervision of virtual currencies in China, NFTs, in addition to carrying digital collections, also have token attributes, and the situation is very embarrassing. At present, second-hand platforms such as Idle Fish have begun to strictly control NFT transactions.
In addition to the restriction of secondary transactions, the quality of a large number of NFTs themselves is also questionable. Even if it exists in the form of an NFT, it is not scarce in itself.
"Now these companies are more suspicious than the actual application, because the current metacosm and NFT do not have any practical use in reality, if they cannot be combined with real-world applications, it is futile to grab trademarks." A practitioner told Caijing Weekly.
According to the Tianyancha APP, since January this year, the trademark applications of a number of well-known companies have been rejected, including the Xiaohongshu Meta-Universe, iQiyi Adventure Meta-Universe, Tantan Meta-Universe, NetEase-applied "Music Meta-Universe", and a number of "Meta-Universe" trademarks applied for registration by Ideal Auto's affiliates, etc., have been rejected for review.
At present, whether it is Tencent, Ali, or the B station, JD.com, NetEase, and Xiaohongshu that have entered the NFT, the words "meta-universe" and "NFT" almost do not appear in the name of the project or product launched.
In fact, some companies applying for meta-universe trademarks, and even within the companies that launched NFTs, are not clear about the intention of the current companies to apply for these trademarks and the specific applications after that.
The frenzy of 2021 has caused the stock prices of some companies in the meta-universe and NFT fields to soar, but after the release of this year's company earnings report, pessimistic expectations shocked investors, the entire market was poured with cold water, and even some giants leading the layout of the meta-universe began to get into trouble.
In October last year, Facebook renamed its parent company "Meta Platforms" and the U.S. stock abbreviation from FB to "META", or the English meta universe. Not long ago, Meta released its first quarterly report after the name change, and its stock price plunged by 23%.
In this earnings report, the company expects investment in Meta-Universe to reduce operating profit by about $10 billion in 2021 and will not be profitable in the short term. Meanwhile, the company invested/lost $10.19 billion in Reality Labs in 2021, calling it an expensive gamble to build a metacosm.
In addition, Roblox, which went public last year, was in the spotlight at the time, with a market capitalization of $70 billion at one point, surpassing Activision Blizzard to become the most valuable game company in North America. The traditional game company Activision Blizzard has well-known IP such as "Call of Duty", "Warcraft" and "Diablo".
However, the boom at the time of the listing did not continue into this year, with Roblox shares soaring by 130% in 2021 but down 29% so far this year. The recent quarterly earnings report released by Roblox showed that many of the company's data fell short of expectations, and even after the earnings report, the stock fell 15% after hours.
The story of the metaverse and NFT is not over, but how to get this biased game back on track will be a test for practitioners.
This article is originally produced by AI Finance and Economics, an account of Caijing Tianxia Weekly, without permission, please do not reprint it on any channel or platform. Violators will be prosecuted.