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This week I’ve been regaling the daily email readers with my experience in Big Time’s first land NFT drop.
It all kicked off at 5pm EST on Tuesday but by 6pm EST — and like many others — I’d given up getting booted off the website, which as the developer somewhat prosaically stated was “experiencing very heavy traffic”, prompting an angry Twitter thread from would-be buyers.
I eventually bought a couple of NFTs the following morning (UK time) and have started tracking the prices of the 15 different size and rarity combinations.
Over that short time, the average ROI is 153%, with the rarest Exalted Large Space (Big Time’s ‘land’ NFTs are called Spaces) up 335%, with a floor price of $19,019.
Yet, two days on, the three cheapest Space types still haven’t sold out.
To me that suggests a misalignment of community incentives.
Despite Big Time Studios organising the sale in a fairly restricted way — you had to KYC if you had more than $3,000 in the custodial wallet they provided and the only crypto allowed was USDC — the top-end of the market sold out pretty much immediately but (at time of writing) there hasn’t been enough demand to sell through the sub-$500 assets.
Granted Big Time was selling a lot — 60,000 NFTs or 10% of total supply — but with early access NFT passes to the first playable starting at $1,500, it seems surprising the opportunity to pick up a Rare Medium Space at a credit card-sized $499 remains open.
Of course, it’s too obvious to conclude this as a failure of building a multi-layered community; speculators, players and fans.
I feel it’s an intellectual stretch to juxtapose that angry Twitter thread with a lack of low-end buyers.
But the situation has got me thinking in that direction, partly because of what’s been happening with another hyped blockchain gaming project; Justin Kan’s Fractal.
Given his status as the founder of Twitch (and his personal wealth), Fractal — which promises to be an OpenSea for gaming assets — has quickly built up a Discord of over 100,000 members.
And just as quickly someone hacked the Discord through a thirdparty tool, posting a fake NFT minting link that gained them $150,000 in $SOL from 373 users.
Granted this is a more egregious situation than a congested NFT drop but it was interesting to see that Fractal immediately said it would repay the losses.
It also pointed out how such trials provide the opportunity to build something stronger.
Echoes of this have also been explored this week in the flippening of CryptoPunks and Bored Apes.
Maybe because the main reason has been the declining floor price of CryptoPunks — down from over 100 ETH in October to around 50 now — rather than a rocketing BAYC market, but there’s been plenty of nuance and none-zero-sum thinking around this changing of the guard.
And I guess that’s my takeaway from the entire Big Time situation. It wasn’t a disaster. It was just another messy NFT drop, but like any interaction between a game and its fans — good or bad — it’s an opportunity to build not, ignore community.
Because unlike a Layer 1 technology, you can’t just switch community off and on again.
Bad journalism news
I like that people are starting to delve into how blockchain technology works and understand they can see a lot of data.
Hopefully over time, we’ll lose the snarky attitude though. Yes, you too Stephen Totilo.
And good analysis from someone who placed one of the key stakes in traditional game journalism’s heart.