NFTs
The $BONSAI opportunity | No bank
One thing I’ve been looking for lately is where NFTs intersect with memecoins and crypto social scenes.
For example, minting NFTs with $DEGEN in /degen channel of Farcaster’s leading app, Warpcast, or $ENJOY being distributed in comments on Zora bullets and so on.
Said that, Lens is another cryptographic social protocol in the same general estimate as Farcasterand has its own growing application landscapesuch as Hey, Orb, T2 and Sim.
A common denominator among these Lens apps now? The preferred memecoin of its communities is currently $BONSAI.
$BONSAI is a ERC-20 It is ERC-721 hybrid (100k $BONSAI = 1 BONSAI NFT) on Polygon built by Carlos Beltran from MadFi by DN-404 approach. Its first airdrop wave was released to active Lens users in March 2024, with new waves planned for the coming months.
Since this launch, $BONSAI has quickly become a centerpiece in demonstrating the programmable potential of the Lens protocol.
For example, Lens handles profiles like NFTs and through these users can interact in Lens apps with Open shares—think programmable interactions like collecting posts, minting NFTs, or tipping, all directly in the feed.
As such, $BONSAI can be used to pay for any Open Action in any Lens app and, in fact, has become the most popular form of payment in the Lens ecosystem to date, opening up a new avenue of monetization for creators who venture into by encryption. social scene now.
Just looking around I saw $BONSAI used to make in-app purchases for everything from 1/1 Music NFTs for one real IRL car.
It makes sense to get interested here right now if you are interested, because this Dune panel from Sealaunch shows that creators who have tried to monetize at least once have earned +$200 on average over the last 30 days and are on pace for +$2.6K annually. Not bad!
If you don’t know where to start, my former colleague Maria Paula I recently wrote an excellent guide, Learning how to monetize sustainablythat shows you how to smartly approach releasing your content to $BONSAI on Social Orb application. She recommends…
I don’t think you approach $BONSAI as a pure investment here. It is not a basic purchase and maintenance per se, but rather an entry into the Lens social scene and an avenue for monetization, for example, through scavenging content like NFTs for $BONSAI, Lens app distributions like Orband future airdrop waves.
That said, however, $BONSAI’s current market cap is just $6 million compared to $DEGEN’s $244 million, making the latter more than 40x larger at the moment. However, is $DEGEN 40x more interesting, fundamentally speaking?
If $BONSAI can reach half the market cap that $DEGEN enjoys today, then its current price of $0.02 will be 20x to $0.4. And with the Lens cultural scene on the rise and with apps like Hey and Orb gaining traction, I don’t think gaining ground like this is outside the realm of possibility.
Of course, with any memecoin, there is high risk/high reward potential. Their values can rise and fall in a short time, round and round, or disappear. However, most memecoins are not supported by multiple active and passionate user bases, which is why I think $BONSAI has tailwinds, especially in the near future.