Wanted to write a quick post about my experience buying and selling some NFT's, I think I'm going to skip the gaming NFT's for this as I've written posts about them before and it's kind of a whole different genre. I'm glad they're doing better now, especially Gods Unchained that's finally tradable thanks to Immutable X but wanted to focus this mainly on art NFT's.
Hype.
Hype seems to be the biggest drive of art related NFTs from what I've noticed.
One of the NFT projects I invested a little ETH in a few months ago was called Kamagang, the name coming from Kamasutra and the idea being pixelated sex positions being created through some predetermined parameters of different traits they can have. The idea sounded unique enough and I thought they'd do well, but at the time NFTs weren't really all that hyped, market was looking like it was going bear and now that things took a turn I thought they would too but I guess timing of release and when people are involved/hyped about a project is important and that the momentum keeps going. I'll save you guys the preview of what they look like but you can search kamagang on OpenSea if you're really curious.
I didn't put much money into NFT's since then, aside from buying some artworks here on our own @nftshowroom I waited it out. Last week though someone notified me of a project that had some potential, this of course stemming from the fame and insane news the original cryptopunks have been making and keep on making pretty much on a weekly basis from popular people buying and reselling them at insane prices, one of them being Gary Vaynerchuk. The same person had been tweeting of this new NFT project called World of Women that had just launched and was shy of 50% being minted out of the 10k unique NFTs it was set out to produce.
I moved some Hive into ETH quickly using @blocktrades' service, the speed and amount that was being poured into it kept on increasing. I purchased two at first, knowing very little what I was getting myself into and what I was receiving, meaning the rarity of the NFT's, what it was that stood out, etc. At this point it didn't matter much, so I FOMO'd in and bought some more before they ran out getting myself the # ID's of 5 NFTs with number 5340, 5341, 5342 and then 9645 and 9646.
Things moved fast from there, on OpenSea you can track certain stats, such as how much volume is being traded back and forth of a certain NFT project and what the floor price is, meaning the lowest cost they're being traded for. A day after the announcement the project notified holders that some of the NFTs had some special traits where if you had them you were eligible for earning part of their royalty fees and some other perks. I wasn't lucky enough to have those traits in my 5 NFT's but I was surprised at how quick the floor was rising on these. It almost felt too fast so when I received a bid of 0.5 ETH on one of my NFTs I decided to sell to break even on my investment and not having to worry too much about the other 4 I'm holding having recouped what I put in in that one NFT, while at the same time keeping in mind the 2 Kamagang ones I invested in many months ago and never saw a return on and most likely won't until they make a miraculous comeback somehow. This is the one I sold and of course just to make me regret it it resold for 2.2x the price only a few hours later:
https://opensea.io/assets/0xe785e82358879f061bc3dcac6f0444462d4b5330/9646
After checking in a bit more on the NFT space I noticed a website called https://rarity.tools/ that "does the math" for you. It basically scans all unique NFTs of a project and their traits and gives you statistical analysis of how rare your NFT is. To my surprise the one I did sell wasn't even that rare at rank 3624 out of 10k and the one I expected the least turned out to be quite rare instead.
Rank 600 out of 10,000 isn't that bad, especially for an NFT project that's taking off as much as this one with already 1600 ETH traded in just a week placing it in the top 100 projects of total trade volume on OpenSea. Playing around with the settings on rarity.tools it also showed that the rank 600 card could be even rarer, though I'm not really sure what exactly those rarity settings imply:
If someone reading this knows more about the difference between rarity score, trait rarity, statistical rarity and average rarity please let me know so I can determine a fair price for these once/if the project comes in on a higher volume traded rank.
Opensea also allows people to trade on wrapped ether which makes bidding not cost any fees as far as I know, so you do see a lot of bots going around low bidding on people's NFT's. Saw many of these in the first day being resold under the minting prices from impatient collectors or people who just wanted to gamble on getting rarer ones and wanted to sell some of the non rares they received quick to mint new ones. This whole RNG trait thing does seem a bit "loot boxy" to me where it drives quite a few people to invest probably more than they can afford to lose and gamble either on minting many NFTs of the same project or noticing the hype many are getting to constantly keep trying to be the first or early on to mint low ID numbers of new projects to possibly sell for a profit later. Not a big fan of the way these are sold but it is what it is right now.
Another project I decided to mint a couple after having recouped my costs from World of Women was one I was delightfully surprised at how amazing the art came out of. This project is called Angels of Aether and I think I should just let one of the NFT's in my possession speak for itself as to why I decided to mint. This one doesn't have a lot of hype, no big names that have tweeted about their interest in it or anything and the minting process is already been a couple days since release with not even 1000 out of 11111 being minted yet but you can't really say no to this artwork to at least want one of them in your collection in my opinion:
If you're interested in minting this NFT then here's a link to their website, but of course do your own research, don't expect to make a profit, not financial advice, etc, etc. I just really like the quality art in this project compared to the random pixelated copycats that most exist of or the simplicity of some others. This one kind of makes even the most common ones look exceptional (which my angel above is very not rare and a good example of it).
For now I'm mostly just going to hold and wait, if any new projects pop up that show the same kind of hype (which seems to be the biggest driving force) or usecase such as avatars people like using on their Twitter handles I might place some ETH back into them but for now I'm just happy the first mentioned NFT is doing well, price floor is already at 4x minting price and let's see where it goes and how much Hive I can buy back for it once I sell them. 😝
