Note that the NFT token industry itself has reached incredible proportions. Specifically, the day before, the total market capitalization of the niche exceeded the $15 billion level. Most of that amount went to NFTs, which are avatars – that is, images of the faces of certain characters. They accounted for 53 per cent of the figure.

Distribution of capitalisation of NFT tokens by category

What will happen to cryptocurrencies and NFTs in the future?

O’Reilly responded to a question about the prospects of Web3. Here’s his rejoinder, in which the expert shares his view of the situation in this area.

The concept of the meta-universe itself is more of a hype around the bubble. The Meta Quest2 device [VR helmet formerly known as Oculus – editor’s note] is selling, but its technology is far from perfect.

Tim appears to support the position of Ilon Musk, who has also previously criticised the idea of meta universes. In December 2021, the world's richest man stated that he did not understand people's desire to waste time "with a monitor on their nose". Read more about his attitude to this in a separate article.

Regarding crypto and NFT itself, O’Reilly takes a cautious stance. Here’s another quote from him, published by Decrypt representatives.

My view is that they are a highly speculative bubble on a small basis.

Accordingly, the expert sees the digital asset industry solely as something speculative. Which means, in his opinion, the crypto niche consists solely of people trying to make money on price movements, and Tim clearly doesn't see the benefits of technology behind that.

Publisher Tim O’Reilly

As a reminder, unique tokens became a major trend in the crypto market last year. NFT’s trading volume grew to $25 billion during this period, although it was barely over the $100 million mark as recently as 2020. The trend has become very popular even outside of the cryptosphere, with many global celebrities and content creators interested in it.

Last month, the most popular trading platform for NFT called OpenSea reached an estimate of its own capitalisation of $13.3 billion after another funding round of $300 million. However, it only has about 600,000 active users, O’Reilly said. Here’s his rejoinder.

We won’t know what Web3 really is until the current bubble bursts. Right now we’re inside a bubble, as we did with the dotcoms. That is, a huge number of overvalued start-ups are emerging that have nothing real to offer yet.

What exactly Tim means by "real" is unknown. Perhaps he does not believe in NFT and digital assets, trivially because "you can't touch it". At least that is the impression one gets after his remarks.

NFT-series Cryptopunks – one of the most popular collections of unique tokens

NFTs have become a hot topic of discussion in yet another venue – among World Wildlife Fund (WWF) executives. The organisation had earlier announced the launch of its own NFTs on the Polygon blockchain. This is a blockchain based on the Proof-of-Stake algorithm, which requires little energy to run.

This choice of platform was supposed to be good for the environment, and the organisation itself would not be the target of criticism, as was the case with Mozilla in January.

WWF

The decision was not to everyone’s liking, however. Digiconomist founder Alex de Vries said the carbon footprint of every Polygon transaction was a far cry from the notion of “sustainability”.

The carbon footprint of a Polygon transaction reaches 430 grams of carbon dioxide. That’s almost 2,100 times more than the optimistic WWF calculations. In other words, Polygon is far from being as environmentally friendly.

Comparing Polygon’s carbon footprint to Bitcoin, the consumption of the average US household, Etherium and smartphone charging

A flood of criticism has caused WWF officials to rethink their plans for their own NFT collection. The organisation will not be issuing unique tokens, with the following quote accompanying the announcement

We agreed with our partners to complete the process last Friday. We understand that NFT is a widely discussed issue and we all have a lot to learn about this new market, so we will now fully assess the impact of the initiative and consider how we can best integrate innovation to attract our supporters.


We believe that the NFT token industry - and cryptocurrencies themselves in general - will continue to come under criticism from various experts. The reason for this is primarily because the industry is young, so many people have not had time to recognise its advantages and strengths compared to traditional finance. Therefore, we will probably just have to wait and see.


As we see, many experts still doubt the validity of the haip which was hyped around NFT. What do you think about it? Share your opinion in our millionaires’ cryptochat.