NFTs
Has the market decided that NFTs are no longer worth millions of dollars?
Posted June 20, 2024 at 7:18 pm EST.
CryptoPunks and Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) digital art collections are hitting multi-year lows at price floors.
The lowest price to purchase a CryptoPunk has dropped to 25 ETH, worth nearly $88,000 at current prices, a level not seen since August 2021 when the collection’s minimum price jumped from 33 ETH to its all-time high of 125 ETH. CoinGecko data show.
Similarly, the minimum price for a Bored Ape Yacht Club Collection NFT has dropped 94% to 8.68 ETH from its all-time high of 153.7 ETH set in 2022. “BAYC just got a little unlucky, they were so big and so representative of NFTs in general, 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 value, which were acquired by Yuga Laboratorieshas fueled doubts about whether non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can recover its former glory in the latest crypto bull market in 2021. However, some collections like Milady Maker and Pudgy Penguins are exceptions.
See more information: NFT market cools as traders flock to red-hot Memecoins
NFTs like CryptoPunks and BAYC “have not proven to be worthy of 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 is a reason why we have seen most L1s and L2s beyond Ethereum fail to have their NFT moment (Mad Lads on Solana semi-excluded ).”
Miladys and Pudgies stand out amidst a bloodbath
While the NFT ecosystem is “showing few signs of returning in the near term,” Edward Wilson of blockchain analytics firm Nansen noted that some NFT collections “buck this trend.”
“Pudgy Penguins and Miladys are exceptions in this market as they have become the identity of crypto twitter as they are highly engaged and crypto-native. This has resulted in many teams, like LayerZero, ZKsync and many others, allocating a percentage of their airdrop to these communities,” Wilson, who is not a Pudgies or Miladys holder, told Unchained over Telegram.
Unlike the two collections under the Yuga Labs umbrella, Pudgy Penguins and Milady Maker, the largest NFT collections behind CryptoPunks and BAYC with a non-zero 24-hour trading volume, saw their floor prices increase last year. According to CoinGecko, Milady Maker’s floor price rose 65% to 5 ETH last year, while Pudgy Penguins saw its number grow nearly 88% to 8.5 ETH.
Schizo-Posting Miladys
“What’s funniest to me are the NFTs that most symbolize a culture [do] they don’t fight in any way with the price,” said Flipside’s Mercado.
Not only are those who maintain a Milady “very serious about the culture,” but those in the community are “some of the most interesting artists in the world right now,” says Milady holder @Virotechnics in a conversation with Unchained, who argues that Milady Maker is an NFT collection that turns into art. “We are lovers of laughter and put all our points into karma, charm and beauty,” states the homepage of Remilia Corporation, the art collective behind Milady Maker.
“Miladys is simply chaotic, nothing seems to be able to bring them down. The more negative press, the bigger they get,” Mercado said. For example, the minimum NFT collection price dropped from 0.7 ETH to 0.067 ETH in about three days in May 2022, when Milady creator Charlotte Fang admitted to be part of an online cult before creating the collection, and yet Milady’s minimum price recovered the following month.
“Having a Milady (which I had some myself and sold) and killing it [profile picture] is Twitter’s version of a middle finger. ‘Schizo-posting’ (posting as if you are having a schizophrenic episode) is a central feature of Milady culture,” Mercado added.
When asked what it’s like to be part of the Milady community, a crypto user known as @Dissensio_Owl said that owning a Milady is “of no use” but revealed that it helps “have more street credibility as I [live action role play] as an anonymous character.”
Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, the co-founders of the failed hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, are prominent figures who have profile photos of Milady. However, they are not entirely representative of Milady Maker culture, as their spirit relies in part on pseudonymity, said @Virotechnic.
A Milady rave meme inspired by Plato’s allegory of the cave. (Twitter/@NabokovT_T)
Part of Milady’s cultural status also comes from the raves organized by community members, which take place across the US and often in cities with crypto conferences, such as ETHDenver and CoinDesk’s Consensus in Austin. In contrast, attendees at a November 2023 BAYC event suffered eye pain and loss of visiondamaging the reputation of BAYC events.
“If you’ve ever attended a Bored Apes party, you’d understand why Bored Apes is worth zero,” he wrote economist Alex Krüger in a post
The chubby penguins’ game
Pudgy Penguins, in a similar vein, typically have positive cultural and symbolic recognition, achieved through attracting long-term builders, according to Vest Exchange CEO Justin Ma, who owns a Pudgy Penguin.
While holders of other NFT collections like 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, NFT Collection has almost 460,000 followers on TikTok.
Additionally, Pudgy Penguins creating an interactive game on the layer-2 blockchain network ZKSync and distributing physical toys in Walmart’s many U.S. locations are two examples of how the community is developing. When a person purchases a Pudgy toy, they also receive a QR code that allows the buyer to access Pudgy World, ZKsync’s online game. By Nansen, almost 70,000 new wallets were created over the last nine months through toys.
See more information: Pudgy Penguins are getting a domain extension through Unstoppable Domains
Ma also remembers how wearing a Pudgy Penguin helped him make a good impression on other people. “There are some people [like investors] who are big Pudgy fans 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 Twitter profile picture.
Content creator Remy Zee, who has attracted 20 million likes for comedy sketches, made a TikTok where people shared a line with him in exchange for a Coach bag and a Pudgy Penguin plush. “Pudgy Penguins succeeded in a playfulness that worked with real-world things, like plush toys, cartoons, [and] gifs,” said Mercado.