Fluf World NFTs that have dropped $28k are part of a larger ‘Futureverse’ plan
At the height of the NFT craze, NZ-based Fluf Worlds sold digital rabbits for the equivalent of $32,500 each. Now they go for about $3,900 on average.
The drop equated to an average loss of just over $28,500 per rabbit since January 2022 – a trend that has played out in the highly speculative NFT market.
Sales volumes also dropped significantly, from 362 sales per week in January 2022 to 52 in early April, a drop of about 85%, according to Opensea.io, the largest marketplace where non-fungible tokens are bought and sold.
Despite the fall, Fluf World’s creators, Non-Fungible Labs, said the rabbits remained part of a larger plan, and an academic studying the market said Flufs had some of the qualities that could help the project survive the likely cull to come .
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In their current form, Flufs are little more than digital 3D bunnies swaying on screen, and their value comes largely from the fact that each one is a one-off bunny, whose ownership can be verified.
Some Flufs have hats, some have eye patches, some smoke, and each have their own short stories. There are 10,000 of them, and in the past they have attracted a collaboration with American rapper Snoop Dogg.
The value of Fluf World Burrows – the NFT homes where Flufs can live – has fared worse than the rabbits themselves, plunging in value from 4.25 ethereum at the end of January last year to 0.19 ethereum at the end of March.
In dollars, that equates to the price of a cave falling from over $1,800 to $551 today.
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Aaron McDonald, who co-founded Non-Fungible Labs, said in a statement that he remained adamant that Flufs had a future in the next iteration of the internet.
“While the overall price of assets in many sectors of the market is down from historic highs, we continue to build this foundation and remain committed to our long-term vision to transform the internet,” McDonald wrote.
McDonald is the CEO of Futureverse, which is the company that aims to create a new digital realm where Flufs, it is planned, will mature.
The newly created Futureverse Corporation is a combination of 11 different local and international technology and media companies, which McDonald said was one of the largest metaverse communities in the world.
Often equated with the Facebook-driven initiative to bring more of people’s work and social lives online, the metaverse is a vague blanket term for the next stage of the internet.
McDonald saw it as a space that will be created by the collaboration of many entities, but he did not say how Flufs would take part in it.
Whether they would evolve into playable characters or avatars, for example, or remain inanimate pieces of digital art remained unclear.
Associate professor of commercial law Alex Sims currently researches NFTs, and said that whether a given NFT was likely to regain value depended on two main factors: did the creators have a future plan to expand, and was the artwork likely to come back into vogue.
She wasn’t surprised that NFTs had been through a boom-bust cycle, because excitement often blossomed when a new concept or technology came out.
She likened the burst to the dot-com bubble, saying the amount of money that initially flowed into NFTs was likely exacerbated by the amount of money that washed around when interest rates were at historically low levels.
Just like companies during the dot-com bubble, many NFTs would never recover any value and disappear, but the Sims believed that some would stand the test of time.
Sims got to know the team behind Flufs, saying they had expertise in digital design and blockchain, which was encouraging.
“The goal of Fluf World is to build that metaverse and more things around it to add value to it, and that may or may not work.
“That’s different from some NFT projects, which were actually sold a whopping 10,000 JPEGs, and there was really nothing there.”
“I always say – only invest if you like it personally or you see value in the community around it.”
“It’s like any piece of art, if you bought purely for speculative reasons, you would almost always get your fingers burned.”
