The Ape vs Punk Saga and the $SOS Airdrop
The flipping of the floor of the 2 OG franchises!
Hello Friends,
The latest drama in NFT country was the most recent flipping of the CryptoPunks floor by the BAYC (Bored Ape Yacht Club) franchise. Though short lived, CryptoPunks floor is now 64.5 ETH vs BAYC at 54.87 ETH, the leading up to it was quite the spectacle with both communities going at it. It felt like there was a bit of a mutiny vibe among the Punk holders as they voiced their dissatisfaction with the Larva Labs folks, creators of the Crypto Punk franchise, for being completely disengaged and reticent in enabling the community with derivative projects which is the exactly opposite approach taken by the BAYC developers who have pretty much given away the farm to the community therefore giving rise to many successful derivative projects like the Mutant Apes, Jenkins the Valet etc. The reality is that these derivative projects have actually strengthen and bolstered BAYC’s standing and popularity. The question is, does Larva Labs owes the community anything? After all, they’ve pretty much single-handedly minted a whole lot of millionaires. Let’s not forget, CryptoPunks, when launched, were given away for free. Does being the original Generative art NFT project count for something? Does history and pedigree suffice? Not sure, yet time will tell. Meanwhile, the Larva Labs folks have taken notice and came out with an announcement of their own, that is, the launch of a open-source 0 fee, CryptoPunks market.
While not familiar with the details, I wonder if Adidas had approached Larva Labs first before choosing BAYC as their project partner for their Metaverse maiden drop. It could have easily been the case, and perhaps after Larva Labs refusal, decided to move forward with the BAYC project, which by the way, turned out to be quite the genesis project for Adidas and quite the entrance for the brand in the Metaverse. The drop generated 12.6k ETH (about $50m) in volume with over 20k individual owners. Aside from some minor glitches that caused some lost gas money, which Adidas made whole, sounds like the drop was pretty smooth and successful. The floor now sits at .73 ETH.
On the airdrop front, with everyone anxiously waiting for a Metamask airdrop, the crypto community was caught by surprise by a quasi-anonymous $SOS airdrop going to pretty much anyone that has ever interacted and transacted on OpenSea which means pretty much anyone who owns an NFT. Quite the Christmas surprise. While 50% of $SOS recipients were OpenSea users, OpenSea had nothing to do with the airdrop and even felt compelled to tweet about it.
The airdrop came from The Open DAO. here is a statement on their site: “$SOS is grateful to all NFT creators, collectors and markets for nurturing the entire NFT ecosystem. Special thanks go to OpenSea for its leadership in promoting NFT trading. To pay tribute, we have chosen OpenSea collectors to conduct our airdrop.” Along with the 50% of tokens earmarked for OpenSea users, 20% has been reserved for the Open DAO, 20% for staking incentives and 10% for liquidity providers. As of now, $SOS is at 0.00000701$ which is up almost 400% from launch.
The $SOS airdrop, following that of Uniswap, SuperRare, ENS and many others, continues to build up the narrative that crypto is the place where early users and adapters are rewarded simply for interacting with the technology. It is a true symbiotic relationship between platform and user. One where the community is truly valued and made to be the hero rather than a group to be targeted and exploited as is the case in legacy business. This is a major difference that in my opinion will forever change the economics of the brand-consumer relationship going forward. The tokenization of communities will most likely be the most transformational force to impact legacy business where a gradual shift of power away from brand is already taking place. Understanding this dynamic and developing sound go-to-market strategies will be the key differentiator between those brands that succeed and those that fall by the wayside.
Wishing everyone a healthy and happy holiday season.
Alla prossima,
Michele
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