I think the gold rush was for the platform, right? The expectation is that those other mechanisms will come after the crowd picks a couple winning brands to "standardize" on. You want to win the usage/traffic, then you want to create those mechanisms for enforcement by leveraging your new legitimacy. If there's such a thing as a rational NFT investor I assume that's a line of thought for doing so.
I don't own or plan to own any NFT stuff, I agree it seems a bit nuts.
The platform gold rush is exactly the problem. In the traditional collectibles market, the stuff you own exists independently of the platform you bought it from. If you buy Simon Bolivar's personal pistol, it leaves the auction house and goes into your home or vault or wherever; you get to keep it even if they go under, and a new auction house setting up shop won't be able to sell it. For NFTs, though, anyone building a new NFT platform can mint NFTs for whatever they'd like. So it seems virtually guaranteed that any "legitimate" NFT platform will eventually be crowded out by scammers undercutting its prices.
Food for thought: what is the NFT platform that Beeple used here? The NYT article (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/24/arts/design/christies-bee...) says his NFTs consist of "an image or video file, sometimes with a physical object attached, verified with a digital signature on a blockchain", but which blockchain, and whose conventions dictate that this specific signature on this specific blockchain is the NFT? The article says that minting an NFT "makes digital artworks unique", but how exactly does this happen - if Beeple decided he wanted to CTRL+C, CTRL+V, make another NFT, what obstacles would stand in his way? I searched around, and none of the articles I've found seem to know these answers or even acknowledge why these are important questions.
I don't own or plan to own any NFT stuff, I agree it seems a bit nuts.