This week’s featured collector is Yeff
Yeff has a few very cute cartoonish pfps. Take a look at lazy.com/yeff
Last week’s poll on what creates NFT value gave us a result that politely disagrees with the data we’d just presented: brand and IP development led with 33%, while the four other options — closing the fee-to-floor loop, provenance and finished art, founder conviction and buybacks, and doing nothing — each took 17%. That’s a near-perfect spread with one modest winner, and the winner is the strategy Sergito’s eighteen months of floor data argued most clearly against. His finding was blunt: across the whole legacy cohort, years of blind boxes, plushies, and Fortune 500 partnerships left floors repricing as though none of it happened, because nothing connects brand revenue to the NFT unless someone deliberately builds that connection. Our readers heard the argument and a third of them still backed brand-building. There are a few honest readings. Maybe our audience believes the brand thesis is right but the execution has been wrong… that IP development can work if the value ever gets routed back. Maybe collectors intuitively weight cultural presence over mechanism design, which would be consistent with everything else this readership has told us all year about people and meaning mattering more than infrastructure. Or maybe the flat distribution is the real story: nobody has strong conviction about what drives value right now, and the honest answer is that we’re all still figuring it out. Either way, it’s a useful reminder that data and belief move at different speeds and that the gap between them is where most of the interesting arguments in this space live.
The Ninth NFT.NYC Is a Fact Worth Sitting With
There’s a version of the NFT story where the conferences were the peak, and everything after was decline. NFT.NYC 2021 was the apex of that reading: Times Square billboards, celebrity keynotes, 18,000 attendees, and a Bored Ape movie premiere at Radio City. If you wanted a single image of froth, it was there.
So the fact that the ninth annual NFT.NYC runs September 1–3 at the Edison Ballroom in Times Square is, quietly, one of the more interesting data points of the year. Conferences are honest instruments. They cost real money, require real logistics, and cannot be propped up by narrative. They die when the people stop coming. Christie’s closed its digital art department. Foundation, Nifty Gateway, and Binance’s NFT service all shut down. NFT.NYC is on its ninth run.
This year’s edition leans into what’s actually happening rather than what once was: 211 speaking slots across twelve industry tracks, with programming reportedly built around AI agent identity, gaming economies, and community ownership: the same threads we’ve been pulling on all year, from ERC-8257 to Sébastien Borget’s gaming-to-art bridge. There’s also a Times Square Challenge, a twelve-mission scavenger hunt across Art, Collectibles, Certifications, Gameplay, Identity, and DeFi, played on an interactive map of the city. Make of that what you will; at minimum it’s more imaginative than another panel about the state of the market.
What we find genuinely encouraging is the organizers’ longstanding bias toward putting community members on stage: builders, artists, and developers doing the work, not only the biggest names. In a year where our readers told us they discover art through pure serendipity and value connecting with artists above all else, an event structured around access to the people making things seems well aimed.
Which brings us to the ask. We won’t be on the ground this year, and the trip reports we most want to read aren’t the recap posts: they’re yours. If you’re going, tell us what you actually saw. Which talk changed your mind. Which artist you met that we should be covering. What the mood in the room was, honestly, and whether it matched the mood online. Send us your notes, your photos, your grievances, your best conversation of the week.
Learn more about NFT NYC.
Poll: Are you going to NFT.NYC this year?
We ❤️ Feedback
We would love to hear from you as we continue to build out new features for Lazy! Love the site? Have an idea on how we can improve it? Drop us a line at info@lazy.com