'"Tokens align network participants to work together toward a common goal — the growth of the network and the appreciation of the token." That's great if what you're trying to do is create an ecosystem of tokens that appreciate in value all the time. What percentage of systems can be modeled that way?'That's the problem. "An ecosystem of tokens that appreciate in value all the time". The perpetual motion machine of finance.
Bitcoin has actually been able to pull this off, more or less. Etherium, maybe. The rest, not so much.
The NFT thing is winding down. NFTs are basically Axie Infinity, OpenSea, and the little guys. Axie Infinity is crashing. SLP is down to $0.02, from $0.35 at peak a few months ago.
OpenSea is hard to measure. There's wash trading to pump up prices.[1] NFTs have no overall market price. NFT markets stall, rather than crashing - high asking prices, no sales. There's a lot of that on OpenSea. "So far, most new NFT collectors on the secondary market have yet to recoup the costs of their purchases"[2] In other words, the issuer makes money, but the suckers who buy NFTs lose. Many of them don't realize they've lost. Someday they will find out, when they try to liquidate their Bored Ape Yacht Club collection.
I kind of liked the idea of NFTs as part of an asset portability system for virtual worlds. Goldman Sachs even endorsed that. I was thinking of this for items in the US$1 - US$100 range, like game items. The transaction costs would be too high if it took a blockchain transaction to walk through a portal, even for the cheap blockchains.
Some big part of all this is probably going to come apart in 2021. Definitely Axie Infinity. Maybe Tether.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/15/22676075/opensea-insider-...
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/e95f5ac2-0476-41f4-abd4-8a99faa77...