Some NFT influencers want you to ignore the hype

Illustration by Mengxin Li / The Verge

Jesse Hall didn't tell his wife or kids about his channel until he got a following. He had a few hundred people subscribe to his instructions within a few weeks. His audience grew from a few thousand subscribers to hundreds of thousands after he began exploring NFTs.

Hall said that this has brought him more out of his shell than before. I have learned that I enjoy teaching.

The space tends to be dominated by enthusiastic boosters promising huge returns to anyone savvy enough to buy in. Practical knowledge and reasonable expectations for newcomers to the space are provided by a group of creators.

Aprilynne Atler thinks that we are in a bubble. I want it to burst so that we can stop paying attention to the finance bros.

Hall and Atler don't want to be a part of the NFT. They worry that the people hyping up the profits will make it harder for NFTs to be taken seriously as a new technology. Ordinary people see NFTs and cryptocurrencies as a fad due to these videos.

Hall and Atler talk about how viewers can grow their own NFT collections. As long as the people creating NFT content are willing to forgo the flashy "get rich quick" marketing and settle for content that actually teaches people about how the ledgers really work, the technology behind NFTs can be changed.

When someone says NFT, they think their documents can be an NFT, so I always ask myself, what can we do to help? They will be safe as NFTs.

People with little knowledge about coding can benefit from Hall and Atler's NFT tutorials. They make videos on how to sell NFTs. His knowledge comes from trying to figure it out for himself.

Hall created an NFT collection before buying it. I did everything backward. I just kind of jumped into it.

Hall argues that this approach makes it clear that he isn't an expert. Hall will make mistakes along the way as he tries to learn as much as he can.

Alter and Hall both use the same approach to their videos. This is one of the reasons people come back to her.

Alter said that he was the first person to explain NFTs without jargon. They liked the fact that I wasn't an engineer.

Max Hauser, a software engineer from Seattle, was able to make his first-ever NFT collection thanks to these videos. He decided to try and figure it out after seeing kids as young as 13 making and selling NFTs. He was able to make multiple NFT collections, including ones to support children's cancer research, after finding a video that explained every step of the process. Thanks to the online instructions he watched, he now works as a block cipher engineer.

It was an important on- ramp. I don't know if I'd be doing this professionally if I hadn't gone down that route.

When making NFT videos, Hall and Alter have to be aware of other issues. NFT transactions can be expensive, so Hall uses the Polygon blockchain, which is usually cheaper to use than ether, so that viewers don't have to spend a lot of money to follow along. Alter warns about the same traps around NFT hype that she warned about before.

The sponsor will be featured as an example as to what a good NFT collection might look like. I won't encourage people to buy it.

The warnings on the videos can't prevent them from being irrelevant. To let people know that his instructions are out of date, Hall has to update his videos with new information.

The first video that I put out was irrelevant the day after I put it out.

The first video has a pinned comment that lets viewers know that the steps might be different for them. According to Hall, these changes mean that the space is improving.

There is a lot of technology that is in its infancy and there will be growing pains. We have to ask where we need to go.