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<\/p>\nThe crypto market has crashed. Digital art trading is down. But for the world\u2019s biggest gathering of NFT enthusiasts, the party rages on harder than ever.<\/p>\n
More than 15,000 people are expected to gather in Times Square this week for NFT.NYC, a conference devoted to non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, a technology that has been likened to digital certificates of authenticity and which enthusiasts tout as the future of everything from art and collectibles to the internet itself. Buoyed by soaring crypto prices, NFTs became a $40 billion market last year.<\/p>\n
And as a digital movement built on overwhelming positivity, the NFT community showed few signs of letting the recent market issues shake its confidence.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a build market,\u201d said Travis Wright, a co-host of the Bad Crypto podcast and one of the MCs of the event\u2019s main speaker stage on Tuesday in Radio City Music Hall. The conference rented the legendary theater with help from sponsors like Coinbase, the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, which recently announced it was laying off about 1,100 employees, about 18% of its staff.<\/p>\n
\u201cDid you feel at this conference that somehow this is tough right now?\u201d said Joel Comm, Wright\u2019s podcast partner and co-MC. \u201cNo, this is great stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Inside the Marriott Marquis nearby, where the conference has rented six floors, crowds packed the hallways, flanked by vendors taking up almost all available floor space. Many in the crowd, mostly men ranging from teens to late 30s, were in a perpetual state of pitching their idea for how to improve on what they all seem to agree is the future of art and digital collectibles.<\/p>\n
The NFT market grew slowly for several years and then exploded in 2021. But prices for some NFTs have dramatically plummeted, and the number of accounts trading NFTs has finally declined this year.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the broader crypto market has also declined significantly. Ethereum, the cryptocurrency that serves as the backbone of the majority of NFT and other Web3.0 projects, is now worth somewhere between a third and a quarter of what it was for most of the past year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"