Peeking into the sales of the world first crypto stamps
By: Vinh Nguyen
Tags: Exploratory Data Analysis, Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum

The sentiment has been pretty positive within the cryptocurrency community in the past few weeks. Facebook publicly announced its secretive Libra project and promised to bring the values of cryptocurrency to its 2.38 billion users. Bitcoin price soared above $13,000 for the first time after bursting from the 2017 bubble. New blockchain ventures grab newspaper headlines as businesses around the world experiment with what this technology has to offer. Interestingly, the Austrian Post Office recently announces its sales of the world first crypto stamps. In particular, according to the circulating news:

A limited 150,000 unit run of five different stamps — black, red, blue, yellow, black — allows the owner to use a physical stamp, but then save its image in their wallet. According to a Reddit user, the distribution is as follows: 1,500 red stamps; yellow, 10,000; blue, 20,000; green, 40,000; black, 78,500. The stamps retail for 6.90 Euro, meaning the entire project will bring in just over $1 million.

Austria’s Crypto stamp (source: linns.com)

Among those 150,000 units on sales, there is a limited number of 500 crypto stamps to be sold on-chain. These on-chain stamps are deemed to be much more valuable due to the limited supply. In particular, according to the Austrian Post Office website, for the last 100 of these on-chain stamps, the price of each subsequent unit will increase by 8%. Simple algebra shows that the last stamp (if it is ever sold) will be priced at €6.90 ×1.08¹⁰⁰=€15,178, or approximately $17,047. Pretty significant for a postal stamp!

In this post, I share some insights from the transaction data of this crypto stamp sales using transaction log downloaded from Etherscan. At the moment of writing (9PM ET on July 6, 2019), the price of an on-chain unit is at €693.17, or around $780, and there are only 39 units left on sales.

Screenshot from https://crypto.post.at/onchainshop#

Price chart

The below chart shows the progression of the price (in USD) as the sales proceeds. There is no doubt that the price of a crypto stamp unit has skyrocketed after only few days of sales. The second chart shows a similar trend in ETH.

We can also look at the percentage change in price (in the sequence of log time of the transaction). Interestingly, the percentage change in the price is not as constant as I would expect from the advertised pricing schedule. In particular, there was a significant fluctuation in the first few days of the sales. What’s is going on there?

Who bought how many?

It turns out that the units sold are not distributed evenly across collectors. Below table shows the number of transactions carried out by each wallet address and the average purchase prices. In particular, the top 20 wallets with most number of purchases account for about 83% of the total stamps sold. Take the wallet 0x087cd25a3d58a8cc316303fabac1f89b079c20a8 for example. This collector purchases 98 stamps in total, at the average price of $9.35, which sum up to around $916 of investment. If we are basing on the expected final price of $17,047 per stamp, this collector’s investment will worth $1.67M, a massive 182,249% of investment return (assuming there will be enough demand to purchase these stamps in the resale market).

Final thoughts

At the moment, the price of $780 could still yield a pretty good investment given the final stamp will be sold at around $17,047. Furthermore, it’s pretty cool to hold one of the first crypto stamp and be a part of this revolution. On the other hand, the sparsity of the transaction to the right side of the price chart suggests that the price is now too expensive for an average cryptocurrency enthusiast. Will you buy one of these? Let me know what your thoughts are.