Newsletter #216: Becoming Infrastructure
Infrastructure works best when nobody notices, just as SSL certificates quietly secure every web session today. Will NFTs fade into the background in the same way?
This week’s featured collector is JLong
JLong is an artist with a sizeable collection of NFTs. Check it out at lazy.com/jlong
How bullish are you on NFTs after May's rise?
Good news! Last week’s poll paints a distinctly upbeat mood: with 63 % of respondents clustering in the “super-bullish” (25%) or “optimistic” (38%) camps, sentiment has swung decisively positive in the wake of May’s NFT rebound. A full quarter remain “neutral,” suggesting many collectors are still weighing fundamentals rather than chasing momentum, while outright pessimism is muted—only 13 % call themselves “skeptical” and, tellingly, not a single voter selected “cautious.” The lack of middle-ground wariness implies that May’s price action rekindled confidence faster than it rebuilt healthy doubt. Still, the data signal that experienced market participants largely view the recent rise as more than a dead-cat bounce.
Are NFTs Becoming Infrastructure?
When Charu Sethi, president of Unique Network, penned her Cointelegraph op-ed “The NFT Market Is Silently Becoming Infrastructure,” she set out to reframe NFTs as the quiet plumbing behind gaming, AI, and Web3 rather than the fading stars of speculative mania. Citing Q1 2025 data from DappRadar—trading volume down 24 percent while the number of sales slipped only 10 percent—she argues that lower prices signal maturation, not extinction. She points to projects such as Mythical’s game-asset economies, The Sandbox’s virtual land, AI-audit badges on Bittensor, and “machine NFTs” for autonomous drones on Peaq, contending that tokens are evolving into identity anchors, credential containers, and programmable rights for autonomous agents. In short, Sethi insists that waiting for another art-market boom is missing the real story: NFTs are quietly wiring themselves into the architecture of tomorrow’s internet.
For seasoned collectors who rode the highs of 2021 and the lows of 2022-24, that narrative sounds both hopeful and familiar. The frenzy of 10-thousand-item mints has subsided, leaving a construction site where speculative scaffolding is gradually giving way to functional rails. Indeed, the DappRadar figures show users sticking around even as average prices deflate—evidence that many of us now buy because an asset does something, not merely because it might moon. Interoperable skins in Mythical titles, land parcels that unlock gameplay in The Sandbox, and domain NFTs that resolve to readable wallet names don’t grab headlines, yet they keep collectors hooked long after the hype cycle fades. Admittedly, the ecosystem is still lopsided: most activity clusters on Ethereum L2s, Solana, and Polygon, and “interoperability” doesn’t often exist in practical reality. But the arc is bending—in fits and starts—toward utility over flash.
Where Sethi is most prescient is in linking NFTs to the coming wave of agentic AI. Autonomous software needs a cryptographic passport—an anchor for identity, memory, and rights management—and an ERC-721 token is a clean candidate. Early pilots such as Bittensor’s audit-credential NFTs and Peaq’s drone IDs prove feasibility. Yet collectors should recognize that on-chain identity is only half the battle; if the model weights or sensor data that govern an agent live off-chain, an NFT attestation risks becoming a badge without a body. The next phase must weld NFTs to zero-knowledge proofs and secure model storage. That work is underway, but far from finished. Bet on the concept, not any single implementation.
Regulation and reputation are the major elephants in the room. Outside our circles, NFTs still conjure images of wash-trading, rug-pulls, and ecological guilt. If tokens are to become trusted infrastructure, the sector must over-deliver on transparency: royalty enforcement that actually works, analytics that flag manipulation, and credible carbon neutral approaches as NFT and AI’s compute appetite balloons. Collectors can accelerate the culture shift by rewarding projects that have high standards, self-audit, publish emissions data, or adopt anti-speculative commitments; the market has matured enough that ethical signals now influence floor prices.
Taken together, these caveats strengthen rather than weaken the bullish case. Markets rarely reward recycled hype; they reward the first wave of utilities that persist when nobody is chanting “wagmi.” For collectors, that means curating assets with real hooks into gameplay, governance, generational art or AI workflows, and tracking standards bodies and zero-knowledge tooling as closely as floor charts. Infrastructure works best when nobody notices, just as SSL certificates quietly secure every web session today. If NFTs can fade into the background in the same way—boring, reliable, indispensable—the next cycle will reward tokens that do real work, not lottery tickets. That is a future worth staying positive for.
Do you think NFTs are will become a key infrastructure for web3?
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