It has been a while since my last blog post and for good reason. I want to explain where we have been and address a few upcoming things as well. This blog post is more of an update and a reflection on a few things in this industry including recent failed NFT launches and overall market outlook. This will be more of an opinion piece with updated information on what is happening at Single Point Gallery.
Before the Holiday Season, Single Point Gallery successfully rolled out their 12 Days of Giving NFT giveaway by showcasing a unique Spatial.io space where they created a winter wonderland for users to explore. The giveaway showcased new and established projects from the Cardano community all of which donated their NFTs to the giveaway. Every day for 12 days, hundreds of users would interact in the space looking for the hidden elves, oftentimes stopping to make friends with other users. The experience was enjoyable to an extent. With the limitations through spatial.io’s service, there were a small number of hiccups, but the overall experience was fantastic. This special event was a testbed on what we could accomplish and the people were delighted to see a wondrous place as we landed on the #1 spot on Spatial.io’s explore tab. After the event successfully wrapped up we headed directly into the holidays with the intention of taking a week off for family. This is when we lost touch with the site and blog.
As we all know, the newest strain of Covid-19 known as Omicron is more contagious than the previous strains. Well, let’s just say we had first-hand experience. With all of the members of our team contracting the illness in the first weeks of January, we had to take a step back from the site and blog. At times, the struggle just to keep pace with this rapid world of NFTs and technology was just too much. Even after 3 weeks, the fatigue and brain fog continues from time to time. We established this blog with the intent of daily content. However, with a limited team and resources, we now realize this may be a bigger struggle than we anticipated. We have collectively made a decision to continue the blog but at a less rapid pace. We want to focus on quality over quantity, with more opinion blogs but also continue bringing insight into new and upcoming projects. But for now, we will be releasing more posts in the coming days, without any particular schedule.
One of the things that we missed while we struggled to get our health back, was all the crazy NFT drops that had a difficult time at launch. Two come to mind as the Cardano community went into a frenzy over BrightPalz and SohoKids. These two projects had a terrible launch that left many with a sour taste in their mouth. First to flub was the BrightPalz NFT that missed the mark through bad timing with network congestion and bad communications through the team on what exactly was happening with their verification system. The other is SohoKids, which had a little bit of lead time from the failed BrightPalz launch which promised a smooth mint through a raffle on a whitelist. This sounded like a good idea from a community standpoint, but once again the promise did not match the outcome. The launch failed harder than one could even imagine with those who were not in the whitelist able to mint, people, minting more than 1 NFT, and the bad setup of a 3-day mint with a sellout in a couple of hours.
Now, these problems have persisted before, but with the highly anticipated projects like BrightPalz and SohoKids, these issues were heightened through the backlash of the community. Minting a successful project is difficult, but minting with the overall high traffic the network is experiencing is asking for more problems. After the hype died down and the mints were over, there was a bad taste left in the mouths of those screaming at the devs for the failed launch. But much like the real world, business goes on. Currently, these projects are doing well keeping their price up with a strong community. But this brings me to my next point. We should establish a method of minting that allows for a fair and balanced service that creates equal opportunity through a system that can handle the influx in traffic. We will be conceptualizing some methods in the future and will discuss this on the blog in a future post. But as for right now, the community is angry and with the markets dropping a whopping 50% after a sideways move into the new year, many crypto-holders are bitter and beaten.
The overall market saw a frenzy of activity in November then stalling a bit through the end of the year with the calendar rollover signaling a decline in all markets, especially crypto. While the stock market saw wild swings up and down, the crypto market mostly saw a nosedive. Typical for anyone who has been in the space for a hot minute, but also very discouraging. Many who are looking to market and launch their projects soon, face an uphill battle of a down market with a collective disgust from recent failed launches. Not to mention the uncertainty of the overall economy worldwide looming over all of our heads. Those brave enough to continue to push forward should take the time to understand the process, the needs of the people, and establish a procedure for exceptional launches.
We at Single Point Gallery are pulling back some of our services to focus on providing a better experience for both the backend and retail sectors. Projects that we have been working on in the past few months are being pushed back due to this uncertainty and we hope to establish a better system for minting, hosting drops, and other future technologies. Please stay tuned to new posts in the future talking about the services and methods within the ecosystems of Cardano and Ethereum. We look forward to launching multiple projects this year and this is the place to see all the new projects.
We are glad to be back!