NFTs — organic communities and the importance of innovating — 001
Tags: Cryptocurrency, Nft Marketplace, Nft Collectibles, Cryptocurrency Investment, Nft

Left: CyberKongz NFT collection — Right: 3dFrankenPunks NFT collection

One of, if not the most popular topics right now in the crypto-world is NFTs. An almost suffocating level of attention is directed their way right now, but not without reason; artists can rest easy at night knowing that all the work they have sold and minted to the blockchain will forever be known as theirs. However, what’s attracting most of the attention right now to NFTs is the wild potential gains to be made.

People often criticize by saying they can easily duplicate the NFT by saving it as an image on their device, but what they haven’t considered is the true utility a blockchain offers an artist in this context; it’s like purposefully purchasing a fake Mona Lisa. You know it’s not the same as the real thing, so why would your screenshot or saved image be any different here? Especially with a certain way of verifying the legitimacy of the NFT. The main value is derived from knowing, without a doubt, that the digital work you purchased as an NFT is the real deal.

The value of NFTs is clear then, but the waves of people joining the crypto-world to take part in the NFT craze and create their collections have left a sour taste with some. The markets have been flooded with art and although this is not a bad thing, there are arguably too many projects creating enormous collections with generative art for the sole purpose to play into the hype and make a lot of money, only to ditch their community.

There are many ways to go through with launching and managing an NFT project, but some things stay the same across the board. To succeed in this space, you need to do something different, engaging, and you need to do it consistently.

Sometimes, the art doesn’t even matter so long as you’re able to either foster a large and engaged community or build unique utilities. Two examples outline the importance of these points; CyberKongz and 3dFrankenPunks.

Innovation

Constant innovation is one key factor to the absurd numbers some projects see. The NFT space has seen a variety of teams attach novel utilities to their collection to promote scarcity and incentivize holders by providing them with real value from the NFT without the holder just having to sell it for profit.

A perfect example of this is CyberKongz (“Kongz”). One of the first NFT projects to successfully implement a native token(“$BANANA”) with a variety of use cases. Distribution of the token happens in the following way; simply hold a genesis Kongz NFT and claim 10 $BANANA each day on their website.

Kongz have consistently built utilities on top of their token, and this set the collection apart from others when they started developing on top. Not only were you able to use $BANANA to customize your Kongz NFT by either adding a name or lore, but the token also allowed you to partake in the project’s governance system. They then created a breeding mechanism where you could use 2 geneses Kongz NFTs as well as 600 $BANANA’s to mint an NFT from a new collection they released; the baby Kongz. Indeed, it was also a clever way to encourage more sales on their genesis Kongz.

The Kongz team continues to build upon their foundations; partnering up with a major metaverse player in the crypto space, The Sandbox, in which they are producing playable adaptations of their Kongz. They are also further developing upon the project’s native token; the recent addition, the “Banana Shop”, will foster new NFTs and more opportunities for people that hold a Kongz NFT.

They have supplied their holders with a proper reason to hold and furthered a sense of exclusivity in doing so. The value of $BANANA was derived from their ability to innovate in the space and offer novel opportunities to their community.

The $BANANA token peaked at ~$125 USD earlier this year, which means people were making over $1000 USD a day for some time by just holding a Kongz NFT, and even though the price of a $BANANA is down to $13.20 at the time of writing this, it remains impressive. The floor price of a Kongz NFT sits around 4.25 ($17,350 USD) at the time of writing this, but a genesis Kong which gives the holder rights to all of those $BANANA’s can go anywhere between 60ETH ($245,325 USD) to 215 ETH ($879,083 USD).

It’s no surprise why we have seen many projects copy this one in particular.

Community

Utilities are vital to the success of a project, although some could argue that community engagement and marketing of the project are even more important to its success. A good example of this is meme coins; many of them hold no true utility, and if there is one, it is commonly forced by way of rebranding common DeFi utilities as their own, such as integrating a swap or lottery dapp.

The real value of the token is derived from the community; how many people can they get to join their community and how much attention can the project get? If enough people want a coin to be worth something, it will be, even if it is just for the money or what that community represents and nothing else.

One particular approach to community building that has drawn many eyes is an NFT collection titled 3DFrankenPunks(“Franken Punks”), based on 3DPunks and even further down its bloodline, the famous CryptoPunks. This project has all the key ingredients to success for an NFT collection; the art, the website, the proposed utilities, and the right people interested, but the way they have gone about growing the community is unique.

Franken Punks have created a narrative in the lead-up to the release of their collection. The project’s socials, primarily their Twitter, are effectively run by a character, “Dr.ETHvil” or “the Doc”, who actively plays a “mad evil scientist” living in “Punksville”, and he represents the project throughout all of their social channels. The Doc will only fade out of character when it’s time to make a strategic announcement before quickly returning to his act.

The team has been able to segregate the real followers from the fake ones. There are many projects out there that have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of followers, but barely any engagement. Why is this? A major problem with fresh crypto projects is fake followers, either because they unknowingly engaged with paid shillers who pumped fake accounts into the project’s social channels, or people sending in bots to secure a whitelist spot or any other giveaway many of these fresh projects engage in to accumulate followers.

Franken Punks dealt with this issue neatly. About a month into creating their socials, they locked the discord and made it exclusive to committed members of the community. They made it clear that anyone who makes it into the discord would have earned a whitelist spot.

The Doc mainly uses his Twitter to organize mini-events that reward people with a whitelist. On top of winning a spot by these means, the Doc is constantly tracking particular users who are consistently engaging with the project in meaningful ways. If he decides you have contributed to the community enough and are worthy of the fabled whitelist spot, he will ‘tap’ you on the shoulder and hand you a key.

The Doc could now tweet anything and within seconds have hundreds of impressions because so many people are following him and trying to prove themselves. You have so many people engaging with you as well that your project doesn’t even need dedicated marketing, the community you’ve built is doing it all for you just to get into the whitelist and all of this traffic with your name on it means more people will join that effort.

Conclusion

The point of this article was to highlight two impressive projects, both at completely different points in their lives. Franken Punks unique start has fostered an impressive and highly engaged community. Kongz have also achieved a dedicated following, but the moves they made early on helped them distinguish themselves from the rest and take advantage of the NFT craze.

There are far more than just two examples of innovation and community building. As such, please feel free to share any other projects and how they’re innovating in the space.