HOW TO BUY AN ERC-721 – PART 1
We have now received our first ERC-1155. Get a real ERC-721 non-fungible token. Now, we can go and see the different places where you can buy one of the most famous types of actual art base collections called art blocks. Generally, works of art are generated by algorithms, and we can see some of these still being minted today.
We have open projects here, and there are three main collections in the art block world. Here are some of the most collected works by some of the major players in today’s NFT world. Just a little chrome, we make some history. You can see this little rainbow here.
I paid $33,000 for this one, and that seems like a crazy number. It seems a bit crazier when I show you what this looks like. Please access opensea.io. Let’s enter the art blocks curated.
The art blocks have three main collections that differ in what they offer in the art world. They have a curated block art collection which is the main type of display they have. Here’s what it says is curated. They pick the best artists they can find and have a considerable waiting list.
Now, they find the best art in these artists. People commission them to create a piece of code that will then run typically about a thousand times and create 1,000 unique pieces of art, made on the spot, saved on the blockchain directly. We will talk about that more with the means of having an on-chain NFT than an off-chain NFT. Some of the benefits and training you’ll get from the feature of those, but art blocks NFTs are all stored directly on the blockchain. And they are generated at the time that you need them. Here we can see there are quite a few collections.
It started late last year. There was one collection called the Chromie Squiggles created by the creator of Art Blocks.
A man named Snowfro made 10,000 of this at the very beginning, it was very unpopular, and no one understood and knew what this meant.
We can go here and click on it.
We can take a look at Chromie Squiggle by Snowfro. If you look at this picture, you might ask yourself, is this piece of art a little rainbow?
Why would anyone pay for this? That’s what everyone thinks. When they first appeared, there were 10,000 of them, and not all of them were mint. They are even minted for free. You don’t have to pay any money for something similar to CryptoPunks four years ago.
They released 10,000 CryptoPunks people only took 20 or 30 in the first week until a famous news article came out about CryptoPunks that people started buying.
HOW TO BUY AN ERC-721 – PART 2
They released 10,000 CryptoPunks people only took 20 or 30 in the first week until a famous news article came out about CryptoPunks that people started buying. The same thing happened with Chromie Squiggles. Snowfro releases it and says, “Look! I’ve created a new platform for generative art”. Who creates art and others think: “What is this crap? You know why would I wanna buy this thing even if it’s free?” No one minted it, and over time only 9,200 were sold, not all 10,000. He sold the last 800 on the market because over time the price went up an insane amount. Now the lowest Chromie Squiggle goes for $35,000. There are 9,200 Chromie Squiggles, and the cheapest one is worth 8.123 ETH.
Let’s put it all together and do quick math on this. Let’s assume that each Chromie Squiggle is worth the same as the cheapest one in the collection, which is not true because usually, in this collection there are rarer and less rare items. It is also like Chromie Squiggle. Let’s assume they have this value and multiply it by 9,200 items total.
Then multiply that by the price of the Ethereum is 4,360.
We see this is now actually worth $325 million. These 9,200 rainbow Squiggles are worth $325 million.
How is that not possible, right? It’s crazy how a year before, it wasn’t even on sale when they were free, and now they’re worth $325 million. Frankly, it’s just because the NFT market has woken up. People have realized that “Oh wow!” NFTs are worth something, and the Art Blocks entire platform has become a brand. It became a brand because it’s known as a place where all the best generative artists now go to have their work shown. The first NFT artwork ever made on the platform was Chromie Squiggles, so the entire brand grew in value. We see Chromie Squiggles essentially increasing in value.
HOW TO SELL ON A SECOND MARKETPLACE? – PART 3
That’s the concept we have seen in things like Cryptopunks. Let’s now take a look at a different collection. Let’s look at the Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. You might have seen this.
It is arguably the second most famous PFP profile picture project in existence. It was created in May of this year, only about six months since the Bored Ape Yacht Club PFPs were founded, and there are 10,000 of them. The lowest floor position is 42 Ethereum if you multiply 42 by 4,360.
It’s something that didn’t even exist six months ago, and now if you’re going to take its floor, it’s worth $1.8 billion, and that’s a crazy number. The crazier thing is, let’s go ahead and see how many times has this been traded? It’s easy for you can think of faking this number. Maybe all are just held by one person, and no one is trading, and that person lists the bottom floor price at a high price, so no one buys. Was that true while in OpenSea, you can see a few different metrics? You can see the floor price and also view the trading volume. Here we can see a trading volume of 237,000 Ethereum. Let’s put that into context. Look at 237,000 Ethereum multiplied by 4,360, and we get $1 billion.
That is how much money has been spent and traded just for the Bored Ape Yacht over time, and that’s a pretty insane number. It is real money there is a billion-dollar that has come through to this platform because every time that happens there are few things that you can see when going ahead and trying to buy a Bored Ape or any other collections.
Click on one of the Apes floor prices here.
Click on this. It costs 44 Ethereum, that’s $193.
If you try to confirm, see one. I can’t because I’m too poor, I don’t have 44 ETH in my account to buy this, but if I did, you immediately see this is 2.5% royalties.
That means Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, the company behind Bored Ape Yacht Club, takes 2.5% every time someone buys something in this collection. Furthermore, OpenSea, the site where you do all your transactions on the secondary market is 2.5%, so every time you buy and sell one of these you lose 5% of your value, and 2.5% belongs to the company that created this product, and the remaining 2.5% belongs to OpenSea. Let’s run some math on that, 5% of $1 billion. It’s an insane number. It will be $50 million. Yuga Labs has made $25 million in the last six months on the secondary market trading of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and OpenSea also made $25 million on just trading alone. It is the real market activity happening, and it’s a crazy phenomenon, and it’s happening so quickly.
There is a lot of question can this possibly be worthwhile? Is this a fable as a fad as we touch down with CryptoPunks, and let’s think about the psychology of you all? What makes someone want to buy this, and what makes someone wants to keep it for so long? The reason is art is emotionally sticky, and there’s no equation in this art. Anything that makes you feel that emotional stickiness arguably is art. What happens when someone buys from this is, that you can see this if you are on Twitter.
HOW TO SELL ON A SECOND MARKETPLACE? – PART 4
We review a person who bought this. Let’s say Zeneca, who we’re talking about. He runs a podcast called Two Bored Apes.
He created this whole brand around this bored monkey. It’s the bored ape he bought with just a few ETH.
Now it’s worth so much more. People use this profile picture collection to build their entire online identities, which becomes extremely interesting because now, Zeneca has enough money to buy a CryptoPunk, which is worth a lot more and arguably a more expensive kind of PFP, a more elite status PFP. But I’ve talked to him about that “Would you ever change your Bored Ape Yacht Club PFP?” and he says, no I can’t because if I did, I have to rename my podcast which is called Two Bored Ape. Why am I getting to name it one bored ape and one CryptoPunk? It doesn’t quite have the same rhyme to it. He had to change the entire identity he had built for his 130,000 followers. Dylan Field, the man who bought CryptoPunk and sold it for $7.5 million says that these are things that you put in to allow you to assume a new identity. When you assume that identity is tied to emotions, and if you give up, you will feel something in a very different way than you would feel about Ethereum or Bitcoin. When I sell an Ethereum, I will not cry that I have lost part of my identity. Since I don’t care, for me it’s just money. I can’t wait to sell my Ethereum. If it goes to a million dollars per year, I will sell my Ethereum. But I might not do that if I have a Bored Ape or my CryptoPunk or Curious Addy’s or whatever else I have because what’s going to happen is I’ve linked my whole identity around it, Zoink, Dylan Field said this when he sold his CryptoPunk 7804.
That was the Mona Lisa of digital art that he believed one day will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He didn’t want to sell it, but he thought it was a paradox because when he had it, he wanted to prove so much that this CryptoPunk was precisely worth it. He realize the only way to do it was to sell it to someone else for a huge amount of money to prove this is worth this much. All it’s that is true. That’s a huge reason why CryptoPunk thinks he has this big sale, and if it weren’t for that sale, it wouldn’t have happened because he said he was emotionally devastated when that happens. He had a dream about selling the 7804, he built a giant mask around the identity he had attached to the 7804, and when he gave it up, it felt like he was losing part of himself. It’s the emotional attachment that comes from art. Art isn’t just a beautiful picture, but anything you’re emotionally attached to. You can think of symbols in the world. You can think of the cross and Christianity. If someone had the original cross on which Jesus was crucified how much would that be worth? Is it a work of art? It was just a cross on which he happened to be crucified. That has so much emotional value and meaning behind it that it becomes a work of art. CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club, and all the different collections of PFP projects have started building their mythology.
When you’re in that community and shape so much of your life and identity around you being part of the Bored Ape Yacht Club group that many of these people assume you wouldn’t want to sell it and it becomes emotionally attached, unlike money that can be substituted. Similar to art, the reason that these things can increase in value so quickly and can be justified in doing so is that so many of them are on the market when people buy them, they never appear on the market again because of the person who had a lot of money buying these with no interest in selling them. They want to keep this forever like your house. You not going to ever sell your house because it’s where you grew up, it’s where you lived, it’s where you have so many memories, and has an emotional attachment to you in the way that money does not.
