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Kyle Chayka recaps the new web3 projects you need to know, even if you’re not buying into them.
It can be very, very hard to navigate the NFT space. In part, that’s by design: Bad or scammy projects find buyers by masking themselves as organically popular efforts. But despite the rug-pulls and crashing crypto prices, there are still plenty of interesting NFT launches going on. In an ongoing Dirt series of 𝓡𝓮𝓬𝓮𝓷𝓽 𝓓𝓡𝓸𝓹𝓼, we’ll highlight the ones actually worth paying attention to, whether as art, technology, or just funny trolling.
Shadow Flora
Floor price: .2 ETH
Size: 250 NFTs
The visual artist Andrew Benson has long been interested in motion graphics and glitch aesthetics, paths that he also pursues in making NFTs. (His “Wavelet Pools” NFTs were a hit.) His new project “Shadow Flora” are diaphanous blurs, both flower and abstraction, that are algorithmically generated, creating different patterns each time they’re loaded. “I have a garden now for the first time in decades, and I like how each plant has a set of conditions where all of a sudden they start blooming,” Benson told me. “I wanted to create something that felt like a painting while still being dynamic and perpetually in motion.” He uses the format of a big NFT drop, releasing 250 unique iterations of the project at once. Embracing the NFT format requires a lot of unusual aesthetic decision-making, as Benson explained:
A big part for me with NFT collections like Shadow Flora is thinking about the size of the whole collection, and whether I have the right set of constraints and working conditions to fulfill the project. There's also the matter of writing a contract, dealing with metadata somehow, and building out the website that will serve as both the context of the works and the mechanism that people buy them. It's a lot to try to wrangle honestly, so I have to keep checklists.
Everything I Own
Floor price: .015 ETH
Size: 1,000 NFTs
An artist who goes by Stardrop recently photographed all of their 1,026 worldly possessions and turned them into a NFT project called “Everything I Own,” including a houseplant, a hair dryer, and a container of mustard. The project quickly sold out its entire original mint. The photos are compelling on their own, but I think it’s even better because it takes advantage of the particular strengths of NFTs. By photographing the objects, the artist turns them into a unique catalogue, in a similar way to blockchain entries. The project makes logical sense as a group of items, which certainly can’t be said of all NFT drops.
Lil Nouns
Floor price: ~.5 ETH
Size: ∞ NFTs
Like novelists who are said to be “writer’s writers,” Nouns DAO is an NFT collector’s NFT collection. The project auctions off one Noun — a cute little pixel-art character, often wearing signature glasses — once a day, reaching prices over 90 ETH. All that money goes into the Nouns DAO fund, and Noun holders can vote on what to do with it. (Right now the pot holds about $50 million worth of ETH, nbd.) People say Nouns is a “headless brand” blah blah but I always think of it as being like if a hedge fund gave you a trophy for investing and was kind of a democracy. Of course, no one but the already crypto-rich can afford to buy that shit.
So now there is Lil Nouns! Lil Nouns are auctioned off every 15 minutes, forever, and so far their prices are much more affordable. (Though still $1,000+.) If you get a Lil Noun, you can vote on what to do with that pile of ~1,000 ETH at current counting. You can see the DAO proposals here. The only proposal agreed upon so far was to lower the barrier for collectors to post proposals. Such is early democracy.
Goblintown
Floor price: 4.3 ETH
Size: 10,000 NFTs
Sometimes nothing makes sense. Goblintown was a recent, classic 10k avatar NFT drop from anonymous creators that was initially free to mint but has since turned over $32 million in resales. Why was it so successful? It promised no roadmap or eventual Metaverse video game. There are probably insiders and influencers behind it; some people speculated it was the work of Bored Ape Yacht Club. Its website is certainly high production value and the art is charmingly abject.
Yet the real reason it hit is because people realized they could make money with it. You buy in because you think there might be an airdrop of some goblin token, or ownership of the project will give you an advantage on some other NFT drop. Or, most likely, you think someone else will buy it from you for more money down the line. NFTs and crypto have the power to turn anything into an instant market, where supply and demand run rampant. No market slump is going to stop such random explosions of hyper-capitalism. — Kyle Chayka
The Dirt: Buy in early or not at all.
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