What I've Learned after three months in the NFT world

It's been three months since I first decided to explore the NFT world and I can say that my research has for the most part, concluded. I may hang onto some of my digital assets to see how they perform over time, but I'm no longer actively participating in the space. Below are notes I compiled over the days and weeks since my last update:

The Ecosystem

• Class segregation: there's a distinct class of participants within the ecosystem that possess considerable wealth, earned through long holdings of crypto or transferred in from real-world assets. This can be frustrating as a new participant as some types of assets are simply out of reach, but as a creator it presents an opportunity to create a premium product. Larger margins do allow you to operate with a smaller customer base.
• Observing the Yuga Labs launch of their otherside deeds, one of the frequent criticisms I heard was the price of gas. Gas is a volatile variable in a transaction equation, something I believe is a fundamental problem of the space. Mass adoption cannot operate with those type of conditions as it will lead to inequality.

Projects

• I had an opportunity to buy into the first minting of a project called Lonely Stoner Dude (LSD) Collective, walking away with 10% of the first collection. In addition to my large stake, I was informed that my OG #33 NFT is rare, so we'll see how that influences the value over time.
• The LSD Collective claims to offer utility around cannabis culture. As a stage 4 cancer patient, a utility value-add is of interest to me since medical marijuana plays a part in my treatment plan.
• So far, Super Pax's experiment with an NFT collection hasn't drawn any organic attention and sits there dormant. We realized early on that the collection may require a social media campaign to draw attention, but neither of us are marketers. However, this does not mean the experiment is or will be a failure; we have brought other products to market that took over two years before it drew organic media attention.

Social

• At this point, I've joined a half dozen discords. Some offer utility with research like NFT Calendar, while others are more community focused around available/upcoming projects. For all of them, I've had to mute all notifications, it's incredibly noisy with community leaders trying to get your immediate attention.
• I'm still seeing periodic posts where participants are panic selling to meet real-life obligations like bills and child support. While I understand that sometimes life has unexpected twists, I find the frequency of the situation to be disturbing and on par with gambling addiction. Participants are over-leveraged hoping to multiply potential earnings but are having to exit before an asset can properly mature.
• I've witnessed a couple times now where community leaders engage in a form of pumping called "sweeping the floor". The premise is simple: In the after-market, the floor is the lowest-valued asset in the collection that's for sale. Community leaders will engage in campaigns to drive sales of those discounted assets to raise the floor price of the whole collection. I've seen reason in one instance I observed (floor was below mint price), but I don't view the practice as a healthy sign for a project.
• Things have been noticeably more quiet since the market took a tumble in recent weeks.

Technology

• I like the 2FA nature that the wallet offers interacting with dApps, but sometimes I wish it would cache my authorization for certain classes of actions. I want to manually authorize transactions, but do I really need to confirm on my phone to favorite something?
• While I'm fascinated by the wallet, the concepts I like are not exclusive to web3. I see parallels with other proprietary vaults, like 1Password, Apple's HealthKit, and even Caden's upcoming release.
• web3 today is not the next generation of browser application, it's more of a tangent, but I suspect vaults/wallets interfacing with browsers will become a core feature in time.
• Self-mint websites are often times poorly built, they leak a lot of errors that aren't surfaced to the user to understand why the mint isn't working. I've resorted to using a Desktop Browser with a wallet extension in order to open up the JavaScript console when I try to mint a NFT. That way - I can see what the actual problem is and try to self-help before looking for support.