The State of Collectible NFTs

Investment Chapter Author: Howard Yuan, Edward Fan and Eric Yang

This research series requires a prior understanding of the history of NFTs. You can find more about Crypto Kitties & ERC 721 here and more about Crypto Punks here.

In the series, we will discuss how some investors are thriving in the NFT space, what ecosystems are currently at the forefront of building out the infrastructure of NFTs, what tools are available, and what’s missing.

In the past 2 months, I’ve spent hours looking to buy/mint NFTs without losing money on my purchases and you’ll hear some of the stories in this series.

Welcome to the Metaverse & Digital Art. Enjoy!

We can’t talk about NFTs without talking about what’s kicked off the momentum.

In the last 12 months, the world of NFTs exploded from the beta launch of NBA Topshots created by DapperLabs, the creator of CryptoKitties, and people who have never touched crypto started to buy these digital trading cards.

They were moments/replays of their favorite basketball players and they had serial numbers and rarities. There were random packs that had rare cards in them but you don’t know what you’d get. They created a whole world of digital trading cards and a system to evaluate the level of scarcity of them.

Next thing you know: one Lebron James highlight got sold for $387,000 and regular basketball fans started to buy and sell these cards for tens of thousands of dollars. The world then discovered that scarcity in the digital world works just like that in the physical world. Collectors are now hungry for more.

Then Crypto Punks prices started to skyrocket. There’s a concept called floor which basically means the lowest price of NFT that’s on sale for the collection. The floor for Crypto Punks today is around 80 ETH ($3300 / ETH) = $264,000.

The momentum now shifted towards all Ethereum-based NFTs from NBA TopShot built on the FLOW token. We now see some of the top NFTs projects here:

NFT Rocks - (Somebody just paid $1.3 million for a picture of a rock - CNBC) 
Bore Apes - (Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs Sell for $24.4 Million at Sotheby's) 
Cool Cats - (Cool Cats NFT Sells for 110 ETH ($359,000 USD) on Opensea)

Where do we go from here no one knows.

But we do know that big players from different ecosystems are all coming in to the Collectible NFT world.

From the largest centralized exchanges - Binance, Gemini, FTX

To the largest crypto ecosystems - Solana, Tezos, NEAR

For now, the king of collectible NFTs is OpenSea as it rakes in $3.4 B in transactions.