There was optimism expressed by marketing professionals gathered at a four-day New York City event focused on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), with some experts saying recent drops in NFT values could be a sign of health, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.
Values of NFTs overall have slid back from recent highs in part because they are often purchased with cryptocurrencies that themselves have lost value.
The industry is going through a necessary maturation process, WSJ quoted Julian Holguin, CEO of 10,000 NFT-owner Doodles, as saying.
“At the end of the day … I think you’re going [to] see a lot of standout use cases from the people that were treating these like lifetime projects and real businesses — not just a way to generate some quick capital,” Holguin said in the report. “The future is incredibly bright.”
Holguin added, per the report: “Brand partnerships are a very big part of the road map because it brings new audiences to the table and hopefully, with some instances, can make our product actually better.”
Jeff MacDonald, head of social strategy at ad agency Mekanism, was quoted by WSJ as saying: “They’re showing real-world examples of how if you are a loyal customer, or if you buy into our product early, you’ll see an upside, whether the upside be financial, or bragging rights.”
While some of the companies working in the NFT space and other parts of the metaverse are relatively new, according to the report, some existing companies are finding ways to expand their existing businesses in the metaverse.
“It is very important for brands to reinvent themselves,” Carlin West, founder and CEO of Carlin West Agency, said in the report. “They shouldn’t change the characters. They should change platforms, stories, and expand on narrative.”
Last week, candy maker Mars filed a trademark to bring its M&M brand into the metaverse, where it could appear alongside various offerings from Kraft Foods.
Read more: Mars Wants to Turn M&Ms into NFTs
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Evolve Bank & Trust said Tuesday (March 4) that it is set to return some funds to end users impacted by the Synapse bankruptcy but does not yet have the information it needs to return additional funds.
The bank is working with Ankura to analyze data and confirm institution-to-institution cash management transactions involving end users’ funds held at Evolve, the bank said in a Tuesday update.
“As a result, Evolve will be disbursing more funds to a subset of End Users on or about March 6, 2025, via PayPal and checks sent via the U.S. Postal Service,” the bank said in the update.
To continue identifying and returning funds to the appropriate end users, Evolve needs to receive more transactional data from other Synapse ecosystem banks and to examine that data, according to the update.
“If and when we receive the necessary data from the Synapse ecosystem banks, we expect the comprehensive, ecosystem-wide reconciliation will determine which banks hold End Users’ funds, how much each bank holds, and what still needs to be disbursed to End Users,” Evolve said in the update.
Before Synapse’s bankruptcy, Synapse connected other FinTech firms with banks, helping those startups store their customers’ money, PYMNTS reported in February.
At its peak, Synapse was managing billions of dollars, and when it collapsed in April, thousands of people were locked out of their accounts.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) cited the Synapse situation in September when proposing a rule that would strengthen recordkeeping for bank deposits received from third party, non-bank companies that accept those deposits on behalf of consumers and businesses, PYMNTS reported at the time.
Currently, when non-bank companies deposit their customers’ funds in a bank, they do so in a single custodial account that may hold funds of thousands of consumers and businesses — and the bank may not know the individual owners of funds in the custodial account.
Evolve said in its Tuesday update that it is working with the other Synapse ecosystem banks to get the transaction data it needs to determine where end users’ funds are being held, because the Synapse ledger is unreliable.
“While the process for reconciling and recovering from the Synapse bankruptcy is taking longer than expected, we remain optimistic that with cooperation from the Synapse ecosystem banks, End Users funds can be located and returned to their rightful owners,” the bank said.