NFT Research Path:
A finger points - someone else researches and extrapolates.
I actually missed all of the NFTs, or gave some away, or paper-handed / sold early. I watched shit start and moon, and bought nothing.
I looked at them though.
Here is a list of observations or ideas.
Artblocks:
There are some recordings of podcasts discussing this.
Fidenzas are the notable thing in my mind:
Patterns and compositions and colors fed into a randomizer - with different rules for how they are combined — or maybe as simple as randomized abstract art assembled with a minting hash as a unique trigger.
.:.
Infinite variations of PFP Garbage across multiple chains.
A lot of this was formulaic like fork some front end, and use the same back end contracts, and then hire someone from fiver, and then make an alliteration, or something obscene.
”Degenerate Ducks Dropping now on Solana!”
Etc.
You may not believe me - but I legit didn’t know that degen ducks were a thing before I typed that - and then I looked it up for a photo— and lo and behold, there they were — and its basically as underperforming and low effort as I anticipated.
If you wanted to research these, You could probably get rid of any of them that rugged, or any that were super ephemeral.
Opensea and some of the rarity tracking sites will let you see which ones are popular, and not, — there is a discord server called rarity sniper — you could look up.
Most of this was bullshit that was created, and then the same group of people rushed to buy them, before the other people rushed to buy them, and then flipped them - and then moved on.
Some were derivations.
Pixel Degen Ducks.
Baby Degen Ducks.
etc.
honestly, these are kind of boring.
They were onto something tho - basically an extrapolation of the artblocks phenom - into personalized avatar collectables.
.:.
Onchain Analysis Front Running:
There was another scam series that sort of evolved after that - which was some kind of Nansen.AI front-running technique - which basically was like going through the most successful projects, and capturing the addresses that were used to store or purchase the NFTs - and then linking those addresses up in your Nansen watch list — and making some kind of database, which allowed you to check and see — who the big buyers were, whether or not they also had big accounts on twitter - what their ROI was - and when they bought into a new collection that was minting.
If a competent influencer bought one - then you could reasonably assume that they would shill it on their channel — so you basically wanted to buy right after they bought - and before they shilled.
This is the strat of MEV Collector:
Good reason to get familiar with Nansen — or other onchain analysis tools.
.:.
Social Clubs:
The legitimacy of different projects came more into focus, when I realized it was not really just a bunch of dumb people collecting animals. — it was like social status clubs — or even advert collectives.
It’s also - if you think of it that way — a list of curated people who all qualify under certain criteria of knowledge | income | temperment | risk appetite |
So, while Degen Ducks may be bullshit — they may also be turned into something not-bullshit — if some kind of brand used that to offer legitimacy.
We see this with the adoption of BAYC or Punks or Cool Cats with Celebs.
We also see it with the adoption of these with some kind of brand endorsement deals.
So, BAYC gets bought and used by Addias - and then they make a drop, make huge money etc.
Or BAYC gets used by Arizona Iced Tea.
You can also see this in how the community members create fanart surrounding things — which happened with Cool Cats.
Pretty sure Cool Cats is working on something like — a merch store where you can sell your merch you created with cool cats on them?
idk.
.:.
Some of the viral influencer type thing that happened gave certain ones more lasting power - well known defi founders got punks with white hair - some defi 2.0 types got pudgy penguins.
There are cultural memes — like they talk to each other on twitter this way.
SOL Penguins saying Noot to each other is a recent phenom.
[a solid scroll of noots.]
.:.
Broken and lost dreams pertaining to Penguins:
When you see penguins like Pudgy or Pixel Or Pesky Or whatever. — you have basically an arctic group of nft birds — all defi fluent.
You could create a snow themed ohm fork only accessible if you have a penguin.
Or variations of this idea.
It’s a bit difficult - cause the pengs are on mainnet or solana. And the ohm fork would probably do best on avax.
You get the idea though.
Basically the NFT lists are targeted bodies of people that you can build things for. And people will likely realize this - [adidas already has, sort of]
It’s like — you want to create a product and you need 4k defi fluent people to opt into the product — then you design a product for those 4k defi fluent penguin hodlers etc.
Very comf.
.:.
You can also create NFTs for specific groups of people who do not have an NFT yet — and in this situation - you could look at them like scouts badges - or like avatars that you level up for education or work purposes.
I will probably do this myself.
We’ll revisit this idea in DAOs for NFTs.
.:.
Some more absurd shit: [but not really?]
There was a whole run of super abstract NFTs like “NOUNS” or “NUMBERS” or “COLORS” — the most valuable of which was LOOT.
Basically, they were sold as ‘composable primatives’ - NFTs exist in ETH and can be used as tokens in any system - so you have any game that requires LOOT and you can basically tap into a pre-existing community of people who owns diff. loot. This is not SUPER interesting from a randomized loot experience — but it is interesting in a game adoption experience — because lots of people with money have LOOT — and if you want people with money to play your game, you basically design it so that LOOT and Treasure and whatnot — are all accessible and integrated.
Robert Leshner Explains:
Some knock off shit happened - scams were created - hearts were broken.
but I think all of the good stuff ended up over at treasure.lol
People are also experimenting with composable avatars.
I would imagine land will also be a thing.
.:.
Those gotchis tho:
Gotchis were basically new in a lot of stuff:
First to polygon.
First for NFTs that held interest bearing assets. [lended positions on aave.]
First for NFTs that really rode the brand composable theme — by creating clothes for gotchis that were from diff. crypto tribes.
First for a strong community of creators making mini-games for their gotchis — basically like an amateur dev group.
First for making a startup quest for your nft where you could perform a series of promotional / educational / shill / hype / edit wikis actions — which in turn helped create a bunch of “aagents” — and you got an aagent set.
First project to have a World of Warcraft team member hop onto their crew.
popularized “fren”
First to have some kind of yield farmed component that was a non-erc20 token — meaning Frens points were just points stored, which could be integrated into raffles.
Innovative Bonding Curve for GHST makes it unmoonable and uncrashable.
Super progressive and interesting and sustainable tokenomics for GHST and marketplace for gotchis is a part of that.
Basically just glowing information for gotchis — anything organized by those people i would buy — including gotchis.
Could make an OHM fork on polygon where the objective was to create a Gotchi Land Trust — where you basically denomonate your treasury in GHST and ALCHEMICA — and do it by holding a bunch of land.
So, the land is in a mulit-sig -gnosis vault.
And the land is farmed by gotchis.
And the alchemica all are erc 20s which end up going into the treasury.
It’s a giant co-op gotchi farm, and you could have really cool pixel art landscape assets which could collaborate with said — amateur gotchi devs.
Pretty rad — I would do this myself.
.:.
Meta-Land:
I bought some for a gallery — it’s okay. There was some issue with censorship in the gallery because it was owned by a single guy who wanted to get it picked up by apple.
There are other places.
Lots of intersting puzzles and events people do.
You could do a regular stream or regular treasure hunts or regular thematic gallery or pop up sales shows.
You could farm - [in some]
Looks like the VR places are the next thing.
I sold mine cause it’s not socially acceptable to have porn art on the walls — and i was under threat of blacklist blocking or something —
So — basically if you have land - figure out a way to use it productively.
.:.
Games I haven’t Played:
You could do a lot of research into these — just look up play 2 earn | gamefi
shit tons of them - I can’t really be bothered to do anything with them, cause I don’t have time for it - but if I was 7 to 12 or something — and I didn’t want to learn to code — i probably would intro people to web3 this way — it’s like — a nice thing to do.
Coolest innovations are that the projects internalize gas costs - and offer incentives for learning — then you basically upgrade or find rare nfts - and then sell them.
You can look into tokens associated with them — like SLP.
Here is a documentary for the Phillapines with Axies:
This lady is really cool:
She has a Medium.
.:.
DAOs for NFTs:
NFTs for DAOs as of right now, are basically like participation trophies.
Or — by a more loose interpretation - you could see them as avatars. I mean that’s what the cool cats are doing:
Vote | Treasury Management | Merch | Build | Etc.
I am mostly thinking of NFTs as tools for DAOs - and that is where we get NFT Tools:
Collabland:
NFT Gating Discord Access
One cool thing you could do is — you could have a training guild — or a working guild with levels of achievement based on competency, and you could distribute NFTs per achievements and allow those with certain achievements to level up and be sorted into channels with others who have the same qualifications.
Has also been used for private servers or airdrop benefits:
V46 does a fantastic job of this: [check out the medium for info on their streaming music club.]
In this line, you could also use NFTs as keys to access websites. There are services that do this - or code that checks your wallet.
POAP:
Proof of Attendance Pomegranite
This is like “we were here - at this time” - they are cheap, and people like to collect them — you can whitelist addresses that have them for things.
NFTX:
Fractionalized NFT erc20 pools.
Suppose you like PHUNKS but you think the market is going to dump at some point. Or, suppose you don’t have 1.2 ETH — only 1 ETH.
You can put some liquidity into the PHUNK - ETH Pair on sushiswap:
Then, you stake the LP token onto NFTx
Now - imagine there is a catastrophic but temporary DUMP on PHUNKS — and the prices all go to 0.
People will use the liqudity offered for “floor prices” on NFTx and then you will basically have you LP sold into — which will increase the proportion of PHUNK in your pair — as well as give you fees and yield.
So, if there is a bear run on NFTs and prices dip severely — Liquidity providers will be given a bunch of tokenized PHUNKs which will be able to be translated into the PHUNKS in the NFTx Pool.
You could also work something out where you had a NFTx integration into a pre-existing yield farm [would work with NFT20 on Polygon as well] — All you need is to have something like sKLIMA - KLIMA20 Pair.
Which would be some kind of tokenized version of a NFT collection designed for KLIMA DAO.
Then you basically get your Klima Community to pay for the NFTs - help seed a DAO for community projects - and then fractionalize the NFTs and form a pool with sKLIMA.
This basically would have the effect of the floor for the NFT price being correlated with the price of KLIMA.
It would also act as another sink for KLIMA tokens.
There are other variations with a buyback mechanism — with pools created specifically for that pairing — possible only on polygon at the moment — maybe Solana — depends on the availability of fractionalization protocols, or if you have someone to fork it for you.
This is a good idea. I would do this.
LINKDROP + MASK
Distribution methods for spreading out your tokens to audiences —
Linkdrop helps with onboarding, and the guy is nice.
Mask helps with Twitter Integrated Distribution.
Both use affordable gas ecosystems.
Mask has cool privacy features — not sure why it isn’t more widely used for grassroots community building.
ANONyMICE and ETHERORcs:
Cool somewhat recent innovations.
Check them out:
Anonymice was early to the whole “Our mice have an ERC 20 you earn by holding our mice.”
Cool burn mechanics.
Then many forks came out copying this idea — then everybody needed an erc20 plus an nft.
.:.
EtherOrcs looks legit like a combat / leveling fantasy game that is played onchain - polygon.
.:.
More?
I don’t have any more for you right now.
But you could go listen to Brady Mckenna’s Twitch Stream:
Dappstream
Brady knows a ton - and introduced me to a lot of NFT stuff.
Honorable mentions:
Probably go check out all of those different art groups — you can find them on HIVE Blockchain or different groups - they self-organize and retweet each other.
Community organizers in different minting platforms try to come up with ways to make 1/1 artists work on projects to ship and promote their platform — see makers place.
$DONAs were super funny. and set up a 1:1 ERC20 to NFT swap — and launched on Miso.
Mojimons — sort of an unfortunate failed experiment — but nice art, and cool ideas.
There is a failure point in ETH Mainnet NFT structure where if prices drop to a certain point, it becomes too expensive to buy them cause gas costs are too high - and you can’t bundle transactions on opensea rn.
So there is this low floor no mans land that occures.
Speaking of sweeping floors - I thought this was funny as well:
tax loss harvesting capitulation as a service.
.:.
What could you do with this information?
I would suggest if you are planning on going research sociologist — to look deeply into one area - and hype up // educate on behalf of that community — find a way to build for them, and then get rewarded.
An example — could be entirely centered around NFTx — go to those communities — all of them that have art you like — and then start there to help them out and make a video series about each of them — think of yourself like a tourist / investigator / cultural archeologist — and you’ll uncover their strategies, and community narratives — etc.
You could get paid in ERC20s and then save up - or you could be gifted floor NFTs.
Hold them or LP. — probably if you want to dump them, just don’t bother with that community in the first place.
Salud.