This research series requires prior understanding of the history of NFT’s. You can find more about Crypto Kitties & ERC 721 here and more about Crypto Punks here.
In the series, we will discuss how some investors are thriving in the NFT space, what ecosystems are currently in the forefront of building out the infrastructure of NFTs, what tools are available, and what’s missing.
In the past 2 months, I’ve spent hours looking to buy / mint NFT’s without losing money on my purchases and you’ll hear some of the stories in this series.
Welcome to the Metaverse & Digital Art. Enjoy!
We can’t talk about NFTs without talking about what’s kicked off the momentum.
In the last 12 months, the world of NFTs exploded from the beta launch of NBA Topshots created by DapperLabs the creator of CryptoKitties and people who have never touched crypto started to buy these digital trading cards.
They were moments / replays of their favorite basketball players, they had serial numbers and rarities, there were random packs that have rare cards in them but you don’t know what you’d get. They created a whole world of digital trading cards and a system to evaluate the level of scarcity of them.
Next thing you know, one Lebron James highlight got sold for $387,000, regular basketball fans started to buy and sell these cards for 10s of thousands of dollars. The world then discovered that scarcity in the digital world works just like the physical world. Collectors are now hungry for more.
Then Crypto Punks prices started to skyrocket. There’s a concept called floor which basically means the lowest price NFT that’s on sale for the collection. The floor for Crypto Punks today is around 80 ETH ($3300 / ETH) = $264,000.
The momentum now shifted towards all Ethereum based NFTs from NBA TopShot built on FLOW token. We now see some of the top NFTs projects here:
NFT Rocks - (Somebody just paid $1.3 million for a picture of a rock - CNBC)
Bore Apes - (Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Sell for $24.4 Million at Sotheby's)
Cool Cats - (Cool Cats NFT Sells for 110 ETH ($359,000 USD) on Opensea)
Where do we go from here? No one knows.
But we do know that big players from different ecosystems are all coming in to the Collectible NFT world.
From the largest centralized exchanges - Binance, Gemini, FTX
And the largest crypto ecosystems - Solana, Tezos, NEAR
For now, the king of collectible NFT’s is OpenSea as it rakes In $3.4 B in transactions.
Follow along to learn more about collectible NFT’s in this NFT research series (1/5).