I don’t think you’ll read about it in Web3 is going just great but NFTs are (still) not dead (again).
Because whatever Kotaku thinks about Yuga Labs’ poop game — nice headline, terrible take — the community Yuga Labs has built really do seem to care about the poop game (technically it’s called Dookey Dash).
Not because it’s a poop game but because it’s the sort of community-based game theory game that you could not make without blockchain. In other words, it’s not about that ‘poop game’, it’s about *the* game — the infinite one.
Indeed one of the significant outcomes of the Sewer Pass mint is that it demonstrates just how active that community is.
There are only 10,000 Bored Apes and 20,000 Mutant Apes, which means the total supply of Sewer Pass NFTs is 30,000.
So the fact that 16,738 NFTs have been minted means the majority of BAYC and MAYC holders have already minted their Sewer Passes.
Breaking down the figures in more detail, we can see the following have been minted:
9,078 Tier 1 passes — requiring just a Mutant
1,929 Tier 2 passes — Mutant + Kennel Club
1,964 Tier 3 passes — Ape
3,767 Tier 4 passes — Ape + Kennel Club
This means that 55% of Mutant holders have minted and 57% of Ape holders have minted, and that within the first 24 hours of launch. Like the ‘poop game’ itself, the minting window runs until Wednesday 8th February.
Now the fact that these NFTs are already trading with a Tier 1 floor price of 1.5 ETH (c. $2,450) or 4.9 ETH (C. $7,500) for Tier 4 is definitely part of the game.
Total trading volume to-date on the collection is $13 million from over 4,200 trades.
Notably, however, only 6% of the total supply is currently listed for sale. That suggests that although there’s some quick profit to be made, this isn’t a community that’s mainly interested in quick profit.
If it was interested in a quick profit, it would have sold out a long time ago.
Instead, I think it’s interested in long term investment and the process, which currently includes playing a poop game to collect high scores — which will also be part of *the* game as you’ll be able to trade them too — and eventually get some other sort of tradeable reward.
Certainly it’s easy to see how a certain point of view could compress this down to a bunch of crypto bros colluding into some insider-dealing-ponzi-scheme (maybe even one with Nazi undertones), but the resilience of crypto in general — still not worth zero — and NFTs more specifically should by now be suggesting that another philosophy is at work.
And without boring everyone silly, it’s also worth highlighting that it’s not just Yuga Labs leading the charge. This week CyberBrokers successfully launched its mech parts mint too.
This is an event that’s been a year in the making as a set of mech parts — legs, arms, engine, body and head — have been distributed to NFT holders through a series of online ARGs.
These parts have now been revealed into their final art style with the process of constructing a complete mech happening in February.
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