So yeh. This was the fourth and final piece in my Velocitize series about blockchain and WordPress, and it covered the topics that would absolutely explode in 2022: NFTs and Web3.
Writing in September 2021, I had no idea how spectacularly the NFT hype cycle would peak and crash. Nobody did.
NFTs: Digital Scarcity
Non-Fungible Tokens introduce “digital scarcity”—making unique digital assets provably singular.
Unlike traditional digital content (which can be infinitely copied), NFTs create uniqueness comparable to rare collectible coins. You can screenshot a Beeple artwork, but you can’t fake owning the actual NFT.
The Examples Everyone Cited in 2021
Beeple’s $69 Million Sale: Digital artist Mike Winkelmann (Beeple) sold an NFT collage through Christie’s auction house for $69.3 million. It was the third-highest price ever paid for a work by a living artist.
The art world collectively lost its mind. “How can you sell a JPEG for $69 million?” became the cocktail party debate.
CryptoKitties: Launched in 2017, these collectible digital cats demonstrated how scarcity drives engagement. Users bred virtual cats with different traits, creating unique combinations. Some sold for over $100,000.
It was Pokemon meets blockchain, and it briefly congested the entire Ethereum network because so many people were trading cartoon cats.
WordPress Use Cases (Theoretical)
In 2021, I proposed several applications for the WordPress ecosystem:
Premium Theme NFTs: Designer WordPress themes as exclusive digital collectibles. Only 100 copies exist, each authenticated on-chain.
License Certificates: NFT-based plugin and theme licenses replacing traditional license keys. Transferable, verifiable, impossible to pirate.
Content NFTs: Publications monetizing articles as collectible assets, with potential revenue-sharing when NFTs resell on secondary markets.
Gaming Assets: Transferable in-game items across platforms—a sword earned in one WordPress-powered game usable in another.
Looking back, these ideas ranged from “somewhat reasonable” to “completely impractical.”
Web3: The Decentralized Web
Web3 envisioned replacing centralized platforms with decentralized alternatives where “users choose platforms they can trust yet are not controlled by any single party.”
The pitch was simple: Instead of Facebook owning your data, you own it. Instead of Google controlling your identity, you control it. Instead of AWS hosting everything, it’s distributed across peer networks.
File Transfer and Storage
BitTorrent pioneered peer-to-peer file sharing. No central server—just users sharing directly with each other.
IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) extended this model to create a distributed content-addressed storage system. Files are identified by their content (cryptographic hash) rather than location (URL).
Filecoin added economic incentives—paying people to host files on IPFS, creating a decentralized storage market.
The promise: websites that can’t be taken down, files that can’t be censored, content that persists without depending on any single company.
Identity and Authentication
Rather than centralized login systems (Google Sign-In, Facebook Login), Web3 uses private cryptographic keys—like Bitcoin wallets.
You control your identity completely. No password resets, no “forgot password” emails, no dependence on platform account recovery systems.
The trade-off: if you lose your private key, there’s no customer service to call. Your digital identity is simply gone.
WordPress Integration Ideas
Current implementations in 2021 included:
- IPFS plugins for decentralized content storage
- Ethereum wallet connectors for authentication
- Cryptocurrency payment gateways
But the more disruptive questions were:
- Could WordPress updates be distributed via BitTorrent?
- Could WordPress authentication use blockchain wallets instead of passwords?
- Could the entire WordPress.org repository be decentralized?
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
I ended the 2021 article with this argument: The WordPress community should take Web3 disruption seriously.
Bitcoin was only six years younger than WordPress itself. Both emerged from similar ideals about openness and decentralization. If cryptocurrency had grown from fringe experiment to trillion-dollar asset class, what might Web3 technologies achieve?
The WordPress community needed to lead innovation in this space rather than react to external changes.
Looking Back from 2025: The NFT Reckoning
Four years later, we know exactly what happened to NFTs. It wasn’t pretty.
The 2022 Peak and Crash
NFT trading volume peaked in January 2022 at roughly $17 billion. By November 2022, it had collapsed to under $500 million—a 97% decline.
The pattern repeated across thousands of projects:
1. Hype-driven mint at inflated prices
2. Early buyers flip to greater fools
3. Celebrity endorsements pump prices
4. Reality sets in—most NFTs are worthless JPEGs
5. Floor price collapses to zero
6. Projects abandon Discord servers
7. Buyers left holding worthless assets
By 2023, “NFT” became a punchline. Saying you invested in NFTs was like admitting you fell for a Nigerian prince email scam.
What Actually Had Value
A tiny fraction of NFT projects survived with genuine utility:
Event tickets and POAPs (Proof of Attendance Protocol): Using NFTs as verifiable event attendance worked reasonably well. You attended a conference, you received an NFT proving it.
Loyalty programs: Some brands used NFTs for membership tiers and rewards. Less hype-driven, more functional.
Gaming items (selective): A few blockchain games maintained active economies with tradeable items. Most failed spectacularly.
The successful use cases shared characteristics: utility beyond speculation, sustainable community, value proposition independent of price appreciation.
None of My WordPress Use Cases Materialized
Let’s review my 2021 predictions:
Premium Theme NFTs: Never happened. Nobody wanted artificially scarce themes when abundance of quality themes existed.
License Certificates: Didn’t gain traction. Traditional license keys worked fine. Adding blockchain complexity solved no actual problem.
Content NFTs: A few experiments, zero mainstream adoption. Writers need readers, not speculative collectors.
Gaming Assets: The blockchain gaming ecosystem largely collapsed. Cross-game item compatibility proved technically and economically impractical.
Score: 0 for 4. Complete failure of prediction.
Looking Back from 2025: Web3’s Slower Evolution
Web3 fared better than NFTs, but didn’t achieve the revolutionary transformation envisioned in 2021.
What Actually Happened
IPFS gained modest adoption: Used by some projects for distributed storage. Never became the primary protocol for web content. HTTP remains dominant.
Decentralized identity made progress: W3C’s Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) specification matured. Some implementation, but centralized login (Google, Apple) still dominates.
Blockchain authentication niche usage: Crypto-native applications use wallet authentication. Mainstream sites didn’t adopt it. Losing your private key remains catastrophic—users prefer password reset buttons.
File storage stayed centralized: AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure grew larger. Decentralized storage remained niche. Economics and user experience favored centralized providers.
WordPress and Web3
WordPress.org didn’t move to BitTorrent distribution. Authentication didn’t shift to blockchain wallets. The core platform remained fundamentally unchanged by Web3 technologies.
What did happen:
- Plugins for crypto integration became common
- Some WordPress sites used IPFS for specific use cases
- NFT gallery plugins briefly flourished then faded
- The community discussed Web3 without fundamentally restructuring around it
WordPress engaged with Web3 without being transformed by it.
Why I Got It Wrong
Looking back at my 2021 predictions, several factors explain the failures:
1. Underestimating User Experience Requirements
Decentralized systems are harder to use. The user experience friction of private keys, wallet management, and irreversible transactions proved too high for mainstream adoption.
People tolerate centralized platforms’ problems (data surveillance, arbitrary censorship, platform lock-in) because centralized platforms are easy.
2. Overestimating Value of Decentralization
I assumed users would value decentralization enough to accept trade-offs. They didn’t.
Most people don’t care who hosts their website or controls their data—they care whether the website works and the data is accessible.
3. Missing the Speculation Trap
I understood that token models could become pump-and-dump schemes, but I underestimated how completely speculation would dominate the entire ecosystem.
When everything becomes tradeable, everything becomes about trading. The utility gets lost in the casino.
4. Ignoring Network Effects
WordPress’s 40%+ market share creates massive network effects. Plugins, themes, developers, documentation, community—these things compound over decades.
“But it’s decentralized!” isn’t enough to overcome “It doesn’t have the plugins I need.”
What Remains True
Despite failed predictions, some core insights from 2021 remain valid:
The questions about centralized vs. decentralized systems are real. Platform power, data ownership, censorship resistance—these problems didn’t go away because NFTs crashed.
Alternative economic models deserve exploration. How to fund open-source development, compensate contributors, distribute value equitably—these challenges persist.
Technology enables possibilities that culture determines outcomes for. Blockchain enables decentralization. Whether humans build decentralized systems depends on whether we actually want them.
The WordPress community didn’t need to “take Web3 disruption seriously” in the way I argued in 2021. But the underlying questions about openness, ownership, and economic models remain as relevant as ever.
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Published: September 15, 2021
Source: Originally published on Velocitize, part four of a four-part series exploring blockchain and WordPress.
Series Navigation:
- WordPress, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain
- 6 Blockchain-Inspired Projects for WordPressers
- How Digital Wallets, Cryptocurrency & DeFi Will Disrupt WordPress