While we’ve all heard the well-trod mantra that “bear markets are for builders,” until very recently, it felt like hardly anyone in crypto was building anything very interesting these days.
All the NFT drops have used the same old recycled concepts. DeFi still hasn’t recovered from the Luna PTSD. And to top it all off, the Tornado Cash sanctions have us wondering if the risks of building in DeFi are higher than we anticipated.
But when I was doomscrolling a few weeks ago, I finally found the excitement and the new new thing I’ve been looking for. It began when I stumbled into a spirited debate between the crypto influencer Cobie and what looked like the entire population of NFT Twitter. Cobie had triggered NFT collectors when he referred to NFTs as “altcoins with pictures.”
It’s extremely simple. They are altcoins with pictures. Anything suggesting otherwise is larp and cope.
— Cobie (@cobie) August 14, 2022
What many saw as a low-blow insult I saw as a reset of my Overton window and a litmus test of my cognitive biases. It changed my perspective on NFTs. If you ignore all the nuance, and strictly consider the smart contract, altcoins with pictures is indeed what NFTs really are.
Sudoswap is the next new thing
That simple but provocative idea is part of why Sudoswap, which just announced a governance token (SUDO), is quickly becoming the “it” place for NFTs these days.
Sudoswap launched in July—its name is a riff on Uniswap for reasons that will soon become apparent— and it’s the first, honest-to-god, working decentralized NFT exchange with an on-chain automated market maker (AMM).
In other words, Sudoswap is a protocol, and as such it’s meant to work in conjunction with other protocols. The liquidity it provides via its AMM can be accessed by other protocols, dapps and even marketplaces. By contrast, a massive NFT marketplace such as OpenSea is a closed ecosystem with a closed order book; though the customers provide liquidity, the platform gets to take transaction fees.
Removing the middleman, as always, is a big idea. Though others have tried to solve the NFT liquidity problem, Sudo—created by the pseudonymous team of Statelayer, 0xmons, 0xHamachi, and boredGenius—was the first to actually solve it. Platforms like OpenSea and LooksRare are marketplaces, but Sudoswap operates more like an exchange.
Sudoswap is to NFTs what Uniswap is for altcoins
The way I see it, Sudoswap is doing for the NFT space what Uniswap did for DeFi.
Part of why Uniswap was a big deal when it launched was because it took the fees usually kept by centralized exchanges, and gave those fees to the liquidity providers, which removed the need for traditional market makers.
In fact, I think this could be the spark that finally brings the excitement of 2020’s DeFi Summer to the NFT world. Call it NFT Autumn. One of the moments that turbocharged DeFi was when AMMs created liquidity for trading altcoins. NFT Autumn could follow the same…
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