Nfts
Has the market decided that NFTs are no longer worth millions of dollars?
Posted June 20, 2024 at 7:18 PM EST.
Digital art collections CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) are hitting multi-year lows in floor prices.
The lowest price to acquire a CryptoPunk has fallen to 25 ETH, worth almost $88,000 at current prices, a level not seen since August 2021, when the floor price for the collection rose from 33 ETH to its highest point of 125 ETH, according to CoinGecko data. watch.
Similarly, the floor price of a Bored Ape Yacht Club Collection NFT has fallen 94% to 8.68 ETH since its all-time high of 153.7 ETH set in 2022. “BAYC just had a bit of bad luck, they were so big and so representative. of NFTs overall that scammers have attached themselves to the brand like parasites,” wrote Carlos Mercados, data scientist at Flipside Crypto, in a Telegram message to Unchained.
The decline of the two largest NFT collections by market capitalization, which were acquired by Yuga Laboratoriesfueled doubt as to whether non-fungible tokens (NFT) can be redeemed their former glory from the latest crypto bull market in 2021. However, some collections such as Milady Maker and Pudgy Penguins are exceptions.
Learn more: NFT Market Cools as Traders Flock to Soaring Memecoins
NFTs such as CryptoPunks and BAYC “have not proven themselves to be worth tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars,” Mercados said. “While I think NFTs have a place in the long term (provenance, art, history), there’s a reason we see most L1s and L2s, aside from Ethereum, failing to have their moment NFT (Mad Lads on Solana semi-exclusive).”
Miladys and Pudgies stand out amid bloodbath
Although the NFT ecosystem “shows few signs of a near-term comeback,” Edward Wilson of blockchain analytics firm Nansen noted that a few NFT collections “buck this trend.”
“Pudgy Penguins and Miladys are outliers in this market as they have become the identity of crypto Twitter as they are both highly engaged and crypto-native. This has led many teams, like LayerZero, ZKsync and many others, to allocate a percentage of their drops to these communities,” Wilson, who is neither a Pudgies nor Miladys holder, told Unchained via Telegram.
Unlike the two collections under the Yuga Labs umbrella, Pudgy Penguins and Milady Maker, the largest NFT collections behind CryptoPunks and BAYC with non-zero 24-hour trading volume, saw their floor prices increase over the course of the year elapsed. According to CoinGecko, Milady Maker’s floor price has increased by 65% to 5 ETH over the past year, while Pudgy Penguins has seen its figure increase by almost 88% to 8.5 ETH.
Miladys schizo-poster
“What seems funniest to me are the NFTs which most symbolize a culture [do] I don’t have a problem with the price at all,” said Flipside’s Mercado.
Not only are those who hold a Milady “very serious about culture,” but members of the community are “some of the most interesting artists in the world right now,” said Milady holder @Virotechnics in a conversation with Unchained , which argues that Milady Maker is an NFT collection that transforms into fine art. “We’re fans of live laughter and we’re all about karma, charm, and beauty,” declares the homepage for Remilia Corporation, the art collective behind Milady Maker.
“Miladys is just chaotic, nothing seems to be able to bring them down. The more negative press, the bigger they get,” Mercado said. For example, the floor price of the NFT collection rose from 0.7 ETH to 0.067 ETH in approximately three days in May 2022 when Milady creator Charlotte Fang admitted to be part of an online cult before creating the collection, and yet the floor price Milady recovered the following month.
“To have a Milady (of which I myself had a few and which I sold) and to vibrate the [profile picture] is Twitter’s version of a middle finger. “Schizo posting” (posting as if it were a schizophrenic episode) is an essential characteristic of Milady culture,” Mercado added.
When asked what it means to be part of the Milady community, a crypto user who goes by the name @Dissensio_Owl said that holding a Milady serves “no purpose” but revealed that it helps ” have more street credibility because I [live action role play] as an anonymous character.
Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the co-founders of the bankrupt hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, are prominent figures who have profile photos of Milady. However, they are not entirely representative of Milady Maker’s culture, given that its philosophy relies in part on pseudonymity, said @Virotechnic.
Part of Milady’s cultural status also comes from the raves that community members organize, which take place all over the United States and often in cities hosting crypto conferences such as ETHDenver and CoinDesk’s Consensus in Austin. In contrast, participants in a November 2023 BAYC event suffered from eye pain and loss of visiondamaging the reputation of BAYC events.
“If you had ever been to a Bored Apes party, you would understand why Bored Apes are worth zero. » wrote the economist Alex Krüger in a post
The mischief of the chubby penguins
Pudgy Penguins, in a similar vein, generally enjoy positive cultural and symbolic recognition, achieved by attracting long-term builders, according to Vest Exchange CEO Justin Ma, who owns a Pudgy Penguin.
While holders of other NFT collections such as BAYC sold during the bear market, with Pudgy Penguins, “You had builders who stuck with the bear and continued to use their Pudgy to represent themselves.”
Pudgy Penguins has a large online presence outside of the crypto ecosystem. For example, the NFT collection has nearly 460,000 subscribers on Tic Tac.
Additionally, Pudgy Penguins creates an interactive game on the layer 2 blockchain network ZKSync and distribute physical toys across Many Walmart stores in the United States are two examples of how community is built. When a person purchases a Pudgy toy, they also receive a QR code that allows the buyer access to Pudgy World, the online game on ZKsync. Per Nansen, almost 70,000 new wallets have been created over the past nine months thanks to toys.
Learn more: Pudgy Penguins Gets Domain Extension Via Unstoppable Domains
Ma also remembers how wearing a chubby penguin helped make a good impression on others. “There are a few people [like investors] who are very big fans of Pudgy and when we connect it immediately creates a good impression.
Nansen CEO Alex Svanevik, LayerZero founder Bryan Pellegrino, and Matter Labs head of business development Omar Azhar all have a Pudgy Penguin as their profile picture on Twitter.
Content creator Remy Zee, who attracted 20 million likes for his comedy sketches, made a Tic Tac where people shared a pickup line with him in exchange for a Coach bag and a Pudgy Penguin stuffed animal. “Pudgy Penguins has managed to create a playfulness that works with real-world objects like stuffed animals, cartoons, [and] gifs,” Mercado said.