Hi guys, this winter after the implementation of smart contracts ( Plaza ) I am going to create a proposal for financing my NFT project from the treasury, I would like to assess the chances of how realistic this is.
Since Polkadot is L0, it is not so important for it to have many daily active users and transactions. At the moment we have up to 5k daily active users, and about 0.01 transaction per second ( 0.01 CARL ). I believe that 99% of these numbers are people who come for staking rewards. If no staking, these numbers would be even lower, although they are already at record lows. If you want to feel this point even more critically - we have record spending on marketing - and most of it is marketing for retail, not for developers. We are literally advertising the construction platform not to builders, but directly to buyers.
The utility of the DOT token is currently not suitable for normal retail user. The token was created primarily for developers so that they could buy cores and provide their projects with the necessary capacities. However, I believe that we can increase the usability of the token for regular/retail users, my strategy is to first attract and bring many new users into our ecosystem, and then developers will compete with each other for the attention of these users.
I think many will agree with me that at the moment Polkadot is not the most popular platform for construction, I believe it is the best, but developers go to those ecosystems where there are active users, where something is constantly happening and where there is some kind of hype. I do not want to start a debate about how, in my opinion, it is better to spend funds from the treasury to set up our marketing and developers come to us, because I do not know. I’m just a guy who have some DOT and wants to exercise my governance right, I want to use my DOT as it was planned by utility. And I truly believe that by creating small activities that can attract the attention of regular people, we can help us capture the attention of developers, because they will see that our blockchain is active and hyped. I know Polkadot was and will be active without my NFT collection, but for examply, last month we burned 115K DOT ( If the Treasury ends a spend period without spending all of its funds, it suffers a burn of a percentage of its funds ), If the funds are just going to be burned, why not give a very small portion of them to a real enthusiast to build his experiment? I understand that if it were a large sum, it would be better to burn it rather than experiment, since it would create unnecessary sales pressure. But I’m going to ask for less than 10,000 DOT.
The idea is a complete experiment, it certainly has its downsides, some might even say it’s a waste of money, but we’ll never know without trying. I think the Polkadot community should give a chance to an enthusiast like me, because Polkadot is primarily a place for builders.
I believe that a successful NFT collection will bring us a lot of new attention around, a lot of new users, I intend to capture the attention of mainly those who were previously unfamiliar with the Polkadot ecosystem - SOL and ETH users. I would like to show them that our chain can work without interruptions, quickly and cheaply. Although Solana has the last two advantages, for ETH users they may seem very significant ( remember that the most popular gaming ecosystem was migrated to Polkadot because of that ). I think that a successful start could start a trend and many other authors and even just artists will want to do the same - create their own NFT collections. And all these little lights will suddenly create a huge light:
I just want to remind you that the NFT trend was popular in 2021-2022 on ETH and SOL, but not everyone know that the activity has always been different. For example, at first people mainly used the ETH blockchain to mint & trade NFTs because there were more projects and more successful projects, so although there were projects on SOL, all the hype belonged to ETH. Then the NFT trend started to lose popularity and by a surprising coincidence, instead of quietly forgetting about NFT, people turned their attention to Solana and a huge mass of people migrated to the SOL ecosystem, these were tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, and many of them, including me, then first became acquainted with the fact that on SOL transactions are 100 times cheaper than on ETH with gas wars, and everything works 10 times faster. The SOL ecosystem received a huge influx of users for free, this significant event even has a name - Solana summer. The influx of users was colossal, and following the hype, developers and authors came. No one was afraid that building here might not be profitable.
So while many may say NFTs are dead - I believe we can create something like this - a whole trend that won’t stop with just my project, it will bring many other developers and creators, so that new users will have something to do within our relay chain. Even if not - we will spend 1000 times less money on this than on any other experimental proposal that we accept daily in the hope of improving our marketing.
Just for example, I’ll take the marketing campaign around the DED token:
Lunar Strategy asked for $1 million for marketing, the community approved it, and in the end we were just scammed. And the most important thing is that for a million dollars spent on marketing this “respectable agency” we got about 10,000 new followers on Twitter and 20,000 on Telegram. If I get approved for funding of only 10,000 DOTs, which is 25 times less, I can achieve 2.5 times higher results.
Summary:
Once Polkadot Plaza is implemented, Polkadot will be able to create ERC-721 and ERC-1155 standarts NFTs. I am going to request funding of up to 10,000 DOT to create and promote my NFT collection. It will be the first Polkadot ERC-721 standart collection ( examples of other ERC-721 standart NFT collections on ETH - Doodles, Bored Ape, Pudgy Penguins ). I’m going to spend the money on marketing, paying the artist and other team members, and developing the utility. Since the idea of ​​the project is to increase the number of daily active addresses in Polkadot main chain and increase the number of transactions per second the utility is very important thing, I will have to come up with an idea that will provoke and encourage people to make frequent transactions ( that will boost TPS and daily users in Polkadot network ), it should be something playful, and collectible, but not just collectible. In this case, I believe in success.
As I said, the DOT token utilities are very meager for the average user, it is intended more for developers. But by creating such islands of activity like my NFT collection we can increase he usability. I believe this will start a trend, I will be able to bring a lot of people from the ETH and SOL ecosystem and other authors will follow my example and as a result we will see a whole race for leadership. Don’t underestimate Polkadot, remember the MYTH case, they chose us, which means there is a chance that others will choose and migrate to us.
I can say about myself that you can look at my Twitter page, I have the same nickname, I have a huge experience in implementing NFT projects, I worked with many large players ( I even can bring zigor - very famous artist that worked on Nickelodeon, but I won’t because I’m sure we’d better optimize spending instead of making art on utilities ), and I am just an enthusiast, building my NFT collection has always been my dream. I will cope better than those who are motivated by profit.
And in the end, since we spending millions on marketing in an attempt to attract the average user, not the developer, let’s at least give them some plasticine? So that they have something to do, since now you are suggesting that they come to us and sit without any fun, without any action, because there is nothing to do on Polkadot except build.