The NFT “Situation”
In the November 2021 issue of M2, I was tasked with writing a piece about NFT’s to keep an eye on. NFT’s were the latest in a long line of snake oils being hawked online thanks to the ever mysterious secret sauce of blockchain technology.
To this day, nobody really knows what the blockchain is or what can be done with it, but they’re pretty sure it has something to do with making infinite money for free probably. In my intro, I made it clear that I had no faith in any of this; “ Is it a bubble? Most certainly it is. Will a bunch of suckers be left carrying the bag? Absolutely! Do we want to miss out? Well according to my boss, I have to write this”. I then went on to begrudgingly list the most likely candidates that wouldn’t immediately go to zero. That left us with three collections and one artist. The collections tend to maintain hype longer because so many people buy in and realise they need to do everything they can to keep them relevant so they can offload them onto the next sucker. So let’s see how our coverage played out.
Bored Ape Yacht Club
The safest pick of the bunch, BAYC is still the most highly traded NFT with the highest floor price and largest movement of inventory. After writing about it, it climbed steadily into April 2022 where it hit heady heights with a floor price of 130ETH. It’s been steadily coming back down to earth ever since, now sitting with a floor price of 55ETH
Cryptopunks
The granddaddy of NFT’s, Cryptopunks were acquired by BYC’s Yuga Labs in 2022. One cryptopunk even made it over to Ukraine when an anonymous user donated their punk to the Ukrainian Government’s public Ethereum wallet to fund the war effort. Their value peaked in March 2022 before quickly plummeting and currently sits at a third of that peak.
CyberKongz
After the two heavy hitters of the time, there were CyberKongz creating some buzz. These things have a game element to them generating banana tokens you can burn to modify, or some nonsense like that. As with the other two collections, CyberKongz has been sliding since early 2022.
Mad Dog Jones
This Canadian-born artist just makes great art. His piece we featured back then “Replicator” is still by far and away his highest selling piece. His last NFT piece sold for almost US$115,000 in February 2022. Prior to that a piece sold in July 2021 for almost twice that. You know what, Jones, you’re the real winner here no matter what happens to NFTs. Congratulations.