OTT – Why NFTs are so STUPID?

Author: Guy Sheetrit Updated Date: March 29, 2026 Category: Vlog

According to The New York Times, NFT trading volumes dropped 92% from their peak, raising legitimate questions about the technology’s long-term viability.

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Valid Criticisms of NFT Technology

Environmental Concerns

Many NFT collections use Ethereum, which historically required significant energy consumption. A single NFT transaction on proof-of-work Ethereum could equal the carbon footprint of hundreds of thousands of credit card transactions. However, Ethereum’s 2022 “Merge” to proof-of-stake reduced energy consumption by approximately 99.95%.

Lack of Intrinsic Value

Critics argue that digital files can be freely copied, making “ownership” via NFT essentially symbolic. Unlike physical art that requires reproduction efforts, digital images can exist in unlimited copies. As noted by The Verge, owning an NFT doesn’t prevent others from viewing or copying the associated image.

Speculation and Fraud

The NFT space attracted significant fraud, including:

Rug pull scams where developers abandon projects after fundraising
Wash trading to artificially inflate volumes
Plagiarized or stolen artwork
Pump and dump schemes

According to Chainalysis, NFT scams accounted for over $100 million in losses in 2022 alone.

Legitimate Use Cases That Endure

Despite the criticism, certain NFT applications demonstrate genuine utility:

Digital Identity and Credentials

NFTs can represent verifiable digital credentials, certifications, and identity documents. Universities and organizations are exploring NFT-based diplomas and certificates that cannot be forged. Forbes reports growing adoption in educational credentialing.

Gaming and Digital Ownership

Game items as NFTs enable true player ownership of in-game assets. Players can trade, sell, or transfer items across games that support the same standards. Games like Axie Infinity and Illuvium have demonstrated this model, though regulatory questions remain.

Event Tickets and Access

NFT tickets offer advantages over traditional ticketing:

Instant verification via blockchain
Reduced counterfeit risk
Royalty collection on secondary sales
Direct fan-to-fan transfer with provenance

Supply Chain and Provenance

NFTs can track physical items through supply chains, proving authenticity and ownership history. Luxury brands are using NFTs to combat counterfeiting.

The Path Forward for NFTs

The NFT space is maturing, with focus shifting from speculative trading to practical applications.

Enterprise Adoption

Major companies are exploring NFTs for:

Customer loyalty programs
Digital collectibles with utility
Intellectual property management
Digital asset tokenization

Regulatory Clarity

Governments worldwide are establishing NFT regulations, providing clarity for legitimate projects while protecting consumers from fraud.

Technology Improvements

New blockchain networks offer faster, cheaper NFT transactions with reduced environmental impact. Layer-2 solutions and alternative blockchains like Solana, Polygon, and Flow provide practical alternatives to Ethereum.

For more on digital marketing innovations, explore our NFT marketing guide and crypto marketing companies overview.

The key takeaway: NFTs as pure speculation have largely failed, but the underlying blockchain technology offers legitimate applications worth watching.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are NFTs considered stupid

Many experts consider NFTs stupid due to extreme volatility, environmental concerns from energy consumption,. The prevalence of scams in the space, making them risky investments for most individuals.

Are NFTs completely worthless

While NFTs have legitimate uses for digital ownership. Provenance, the speculative bubble has led to many purchases that lack fundamental value, causing critics to question their overall worth.

Main criticisms of NFT technology

Main criticisms include environmental impact, lack of utility beyond speculation, market manipulation, and the ease of creating fraudulent projects that exploit investors.

Crypto and Web3 Marketing: The Unique Challenges and Opportunities

Marketing in the crypto and Web3 space operates under constraints that don’t exist in traditional digital marketing. Regulatory uncertainty around crypto advertising has led Google, Meta, and Twitter to implement strict policies requiring certification before running paid ads for crypto products. This makes organic channels — SEO, content marketing, community building — not just preferred but often the only viable option for many blockchain projects.

The projects that have built the most durable community and market presence in crypto have done so through consistent content programs, transparent communication,. Genuine community engagement rather than paid promotion or manufactured hype. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on Crypto Networks Beginners.

SEO for Crypto Projects: Building Organic Visibility in a Competitive Niche

Crypto is one of the most competitive niches in all of SEO. Terms like “best crypto exchange,” “buy Bitcoin,”. “NFT marketplace” are targeted by sites with domain authorities above 80 and multimillion-dollar content budgets. New projects competing for these terms directly will fail.

The winning strategy for emerging projects:

Long-tail educational content: Specific, technical questions that your target audience (actual crypto users and investors) are asking but that major crypto media sites don’t address in depth. “How to evaluate DeFi liquidity pools,” “what is impermanent loss and how to calculate it,” “how to audit a smart contract” — these terms have lower competition and higher conversion intent.
Protocol-specific content: If your project is built on Ethereum, Solana, or another chain, create definitive content about your protocol’s specific features, advantages, and use cases. Users who are already on that chain are your warmest possible audience.
Thought leadership by founders/technical team: In crypto, the team is often the most trusted signal of project legitimacy. Founder blogs, technical deep-dives by developers, and transparent post-mortems after challenges all build the E-E-A-T signals that help SEO rankings while simultaneously building community trust.

Community-Led Growth: The Crypto Marketing Model That Works

The most successful crypto projects — Ethereum, Uniswap, Chainlink, Aave — grew primarily through community, not traditional marketing. Their Discord and Telegram communities weren’t marketing afterthoughts; they were the primary growth mechanism. For a deeper dive, explore our guide on NFT Marketing Minutes Israeli.

Effective community-led growth in crypto requires:

Technical transparency: Open-source code, public audits, transparent team communications. The crypto community has sophisticated fraud detection and will discover and expose inconsistencies. Transparency is not optional — it’s table stakes.
Genuine governance participation: DAOs that actually govern, where token holders make meaningful decisions, create stakeholder loyalty that paid users can’t replicate. Performative governance (voting on inconsequential decisions) is quickly identified and destroys community trust.
Developer relations: If your project has technical integrations, builders who build on your protocol are your most valuable advocates. Developer documentation quality, developer grants, and hackathon presence are the marketing channels that matter most for Layer 1 and Layer 2 protocols.

Compliance and Risk Management in Crypto Marketing

The regulatory environment for crypto marketing is evolving rapidly. Key compliance considerations that should inform every marketing decision:

Securities law implications: Marketing that emphasizes investment returns or token price appreciation may constitute promotion of unregistered securities in multiple jurisdictions. Legal review of all marketing materials is essential before publication.
Advertising platform policies: Google requires certification for crypto exchange and wallet ads. Meta has similar requirements. Twitter/X has specific rules for NFT promotion. Violating these policies results in account suspension that can take months to resolve.
Influencer disclosure: FTC guidelines require clear disclosure of paid promotions. In crypto, where influencer marketing has been common and disclosure has been inconsistent, regulatory enforcement is increasing. All paid influencer content must be clearly marked as sponsored.
Jurisdiction-specific restrictions: Several countries restrict crypto advertising entirely (China, Egypt, Nepal). Others have specific requirements (UK’s FCA requires crypto ads to include risk warnings). A global crypto marketing program requires jurisdiction-specific compliance review.

Advanced Strategies for Maximum SEO Impact

The difference between good SEO results and exceptional results often comes down to execution depth. While most competitors implement surface-level optimizations, the brands that dominate competitive SERPs invest in strategies that compound over time: technical infrastructure that supports rapid content scaling, link profiles built on genuine editorial relationships,. Content programs tied to measurable business outcomes.

Here’s what separates top-performing SEO campaigns from average ones, based on data from thousands of campaigns across industries:

Competitive gap analysis done right: Rather than simply identifying what competitors rank for, elite SEO campaigns identify the specific content, link, and authority gaps that explain performance differences — and address each gap systematically. This means analyzing not just keyword rankings but content depth, structured data implementation, Core Web Vitals scores, and backlink profile quality.
Search intent alignment: Google’s algorithm has become remarkably good at identifying when content doesn’t match what a searcher actually wants. A page optimized for “best CRM software” that promotes a specific product instead of providing comparative evaluation will underperform regardless of its technical SEO quality. Match content format and depth to search intent first, then optimize.
SERP feature targeting: Beyond organic rankings, SERP features (featured snippets, People Also Ask, local packs, image carousels) represent separate opportunities. The click-through rates on featured snippets often exceed position 1 organic results. A systematic approach to capturing SERP features can double organic traffic from existing rankings without any new link building.

Measuring What Matters: SEO KPIs That Reflect Business Value

The SEO metrics that impress in reports aren’t always the ones that drive business results. Ranking for 10,000 keywords is meaningless if none of those keywords deliver qualified traffic that converts. Building a measurement framework aligned to business value:

Organic traffic by intent segment: Separate branded traffic (people searching your company name) from non-branded traffic (people searching for what you do). Non-branded organic traffic is the cleaner indicator of SEO performance — it represents new audience capture rather than existing demand.
Organic revenue attribution: Connect organic sessions to revenue using GA4’s conversion tracking and revenue attribution. Even an approximate figure is vastly more useful than traffic metrics for justifying SEO investment.
Share of voice: Track your keyword visibility relative to competitors across your target keyword set. Share of voice trends reveal whether you’re gaining or losing competitive position, even when absolute traffic fluctuates due to seasonality or algorithm changes.
Content efficiency metrics: Revenue or leads generated per piece of content, or per hour of content creation investment. This reveals which content types and topics generate the highest ROI, informing future content investment decisions.

The Future of SEO: What to Invest in Now

The SEO strategies worth investing in today are those that will still be relevant as AI-powered search continues to evolve. The principles that have driven SEO results for the past decade — genuine expertise, helpful content, authoritative signals — are becoming more important, not less, as AI systems learn to better reward real quality.

Invest now in building your brand entity’s authority in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Invest in creating the genuinely best resources on your core topics — the pages that should rank regardless of algorithm changes. They most thoroughly serve searcher needs. And invest in understanding the new AI search landscape where your content needs to be citation-worthy, not just rankable. These are long-term competitive advantages that compound over time.

Proven Tactics to Accelerate Results in Competitive Markets

Competitive niches require a different strategic calculus than low-competition markets. Simply publishing quality content and building links at a sustainable pace won&#8217. T close the gap against entrenched competitors with years of domain authority and content depth. Accelerating results in competitive markets requires identifying and exploiting specific leverage points:

Targeting competitor content gaps: Use tools like Ahrefs Content Gap or SEMrush Keyword Gap to identify keywords that multiple competitors rank for but your site doesn’t. These represent proven traffic opportunities where the market validation has already been done — someone else is getting the clicks you aren’t.
Acquiring underperforming domains: Established domains with relevant backlink profiles and topical history can accelerate SEO results significantly compared to building from scratch. Domain acquisitions priced under $10,000 can deliver link equity equivalent to years of outreach campaigns.
Strategic content partnerships: Co-authored content with recognized industry figures, joint research publications, and content syndication agreements with complementary non-competitors can build topical authority and link equity faster than independent content programs.
Programmatic SEO at scale: For data-rich opportunities (location pages, comparison pages, product listings), programmatic content generation from structured data can create hundreds of rankable pages faster than manual content production. The key is ensuring each programmatically-generated page provides genuine value — not just a different combination of the same template text.

Common SEO Mistakes That Waste Budget and Time

Understanding what doesn’t work is as valuable as knowing what does. These are the most common SEO mistakes that cost businesses significant time and budget:

Optimizing for vanity keywords: High-volume, broad keywords are seductive but often wrong for conversion. A legal firm ranking #1 for “lawyer” will underperform one ranking #5 for “employment lawyer San Francisco free consultation” in terms of actual client acquisition.
Ignoring existing content performance: Most sites have a long tail of underperforming content consuming crawl budget and diluting topical authority. A quarterly content audit — identifying pages to update, consolidate, or prune — consistently delivers more ROI than new content production alone.
Building links before content is ready: Links pointing to thin or low-quality pages are wasted. The correct sequencing: build the best possible version of a page, then build links. Investing link equity in weak content is the SEO equivalent of promoting a product that hasn’t found product-market fit.
Treating SEO as a one-time project: SEO is an ongoing program, not a one-time implementation. Competitors continuously publish new content and build links. Algorithm updates periodically revalue different signals. Markets evolve and searcher intent changes. Treating SEO as “done” when initial optimizations are complete leads to gradual, often unnoticed performance decay.

By Guy Sheetrit
Jul 12, 2022

OTT – Why NFTs are so STUPID?

Valid Criticisms of NFT Technology

Legitimate Use Cases That Endure

The Path Forward for NFTs