Projecting the Evolution of Different Market Stages

"One day in the crypto world, one decade in the human world." Although the blockchain market is changing rapidly, the long-term trend is obvious. Instead of referring the current chaos to a bear market, we believe this is an occasion to eliminate outdated projects.

Only projects with careful thinking and planning can survive this round of reform. Karma Ksana observes the market trend and roughly divides it into four major stages:

Stage 1: Speculative Market (Already in Its Final Phase)

In the early stage of development, when information needs to be more transparent, participants mostly enter the market due to hype and topicality. Ponzi schemes, hype, and various ripping-off behaviors happen all the time. At this period, investors lack experience and judgment, which makes it easy to manipulate popularity with empty words and gimmicks. As a result, publicity stunts might be even more important than actual construction. However, it is at the end of this stage now. There are almost no speculative NFTs and projects, and poorly designed tokens are going downhill, so the market will turn to products with real extension value.

Stage 2: Practical Market (Current phase)

When the speculative market collapses, there will inevitably be a downturn in the market, which will only be active again once objective evaluation criteria are re-established. It is what the market looks like today. Project development in the current environment requires more consideration regarding groundwork and long-term planning, especially the balance between community management, decentralization management, and product development. In other words, explosive communities that focus on one direction will lose their advantages in the future, especially with the hype approach. In contrast, projects focusing on overall long-term development and developing a sense of identity in the community will emerge.

Stage 3: Entry of Large-Scale Capital

The current market is still difficult for large companies to enter since the public considers blockchain too speculative. For example, in late 2021, Ubisoft, a well-known gaming company, announced its entry into the NFT market, but there was a backlash among players. This news also caused many companies, like Team 17 and GSC Game World, to scrap their plans to enter the NFT market. STEAM even directly banned NFT-related games from entering the platform.

In the current environment, most gamers think that people use blockchain to accumulate wealth by unfair means, similar to the mobile game market around 2010. No wonder Nicolas Pouard, VP of Ubisoft's Strategic Innovation Lab, made the statement below:

"I think gamers don't get what a digital secondary market can bring to them. For now, because of the current situation and context of NFTs, gamers really believe it's first destroying the planet, and second just a tool for speculation. But what we (Ubisoft) are seeing first is the end game. The end game is about giving players the opportunity to resell their items once they're finished with them or they're finished playing the game itself. So, it's really, for them. It's really beneficial. But they don't get it for now."

Therefore, large, experienced companies will participate in development with high specifications, resources, and efficiency only when public awareness changes and the blockchain market is no longer seen as speculative. It will undoubtedly directly impact smaller projects. At this stage, the difficulty of community operations and the development competition curves will increase drastically, and most large institutions will not give investors the possibility to intervene, so the market style will also change dramatically.

Stage 4: Integrated Platforms Monopoly

This stage is still relatively vague and is an imaginary vision. However, we believe that the market will eventually move toward an integrated platform and ultimately realize the concept of metaverse. However, we still need to solve many difficulties and improve the shortcomings of the current metaverse to realize such a vision.

• Inconvenience for users: Common land projects sacrifice the immediacy of the Internet to simulate real life. It is very shallow to attract users with such vain features, like changing avatars.
• Unfriendliness to newcomers: Any speculative project will have the problem regarding its accessibility, directly impacting the metaverse concept and eventually becoming a platform for speculators to buy and sell. In other words, a true metaverse cannot widen the gap between the rich and the poor in reality since it will make the public lose the incentive to enter the metaverse.

Metaverse development, including the integration of virtual and real technologies, the universality of blockchain participants, the degree of decentralization, and the accessibility to the public, still needs time for experiment. We will start with Karma Space and enter this competition by integrating community resources and marketing. We believe it will be a potential breakthrough.