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Doodles NFT holders require response from co-founder
Doodles founder Poopie made a big mistake yesterday – he became the protagonist of NFT Twitter. The Web3 leader lashed out at community members after proclaiming that Doodles is no longer an NFT project. The NFT community immediately condemned his actions, and the project’s floor price dropped shortly after. What happened to Doodles to create this problem?
Image credit: Doodles
What went wrong with Doodles?
Doodles spent most of 2022 “building in silence”. The official Doodles Twitter account rarely posted anything original, instead retweeting random posts from fans mentioning the project. As Ethereum prices fell from $4,600 to just over $800, holders saw their unrealized gains disappear and began to question the team’s ability (or willingness) to create value for the community.
The Doodles team’s first attempt at creating value for collectors was Space Doodles. Many predicted Space Doodles would be the Doodles version of Yuga’s Mutant Ape Yacht Club, a companion gathering that allows holders to sell a new NFT and take a profit without the ecosystem existing entirely. However, the Doodles team took a different approach.
Instead of releasing a separate NFT collection, they decided to link Doodles to Space Doodles so that selling a Space Doodle would also sell the associated Doodle. Many long-time holders did not understand this connection, unfortunately, and sold their expensive Doodles NFT for pennies on the dollar. Overall, Space Doodles was a flop. New people didn’t enter the ecosystem, and it didn’t move the needle price-wise for existing Doodles holders.
What happened to Dooplicators?
The next milestone for Doodles was the Dooplicators. In May 2022, the Doodles team unveiled a mysterious NFT with a cartoon storage container in Burnt Toast’s trademark pastel style. Speculation ran wild as people tried to figure out what kind of tools would come with Dooplicators. The collection floor hovered around the 3rd floor in the first half of 2022.
At NFT NYC on June 22, 2022, the Doodles team announced that Dooplicators would allow holders to create a new collection, Doodles 2, on the Flow blockchain. Initial reactions were mixed. Many Ethereum native collectors did not want to bridge to a new blockchain. Others did not see value in Doodles 2, a collection that would allow users to create new wearables for their original Doodles NFT.
Since then, Dooplicators have fallen to a floor of 0.13eth as demand for Doodles 2 fell short of expectations.
Image credit: OpenSea.io
Why did the Doodles founder punch out Poopie?
For the past year or so, the Doodles community has been asking the project managers to communicate more. They were underwhelmed by Space Doodles, Dooplicators and Doodles 2, and collectively felt that their feedback was being ignored. After another long period between updates, Doodle’s Twitter account wrote, “we’ve been listening and we know you want more communication from us. starting NOW.”
Two weeks later, on March 15, they tweeted their long-awaited update. Dooplikator owners will be able to mint 12 different NFTs, each with digital socks, to mint another NFT of golden socks. The community was not happy.
Poopie responded to the backlash by posting in the discord that Doodles is no longer “an NFT project” and that “We are not going to spend any resources appeasing those with financial motivations.” After a community member asked Poopie to buy his Doodles, Poopie responded by saying “floor it and gtfo,” a phrase sure to become a meme in NFT culture.
Unsurprisingly, Poopie’s messages were copied and pasted all over the Twitter timeline. Many people criticized his ability as a project manager and accused him of “selling out” after receiving VC funding. The exchange sparked many debates this week.
Some people believed the episode demonstrates the naivety of NFT buyers who think they have something beyond a digital collectible. Demanding project founders constantly create value to hold an NFT, they believed, was unrealistic and a recipe for disappointment.
Others believed that Doodles made a fortune from NFT buyers. This group claimed that the Doodles team owes a responsibility to communicate regularly, make decisions to maintain floor prices, and generally do everything that Yuga Labs has done for Bored Ape Yacht Club owners. In other words, come up with inventive ways to grow the ecosystem while preserving the value of the original Doodles collection.
Since then, Poopie has apologized for the GTFO comment, stating that Doodles will continue “to use NFT technology as the connective tissue between everything we do.”
Will Doodles be able to fulfill its goal of becoming a successful media brand emerging from Web3? To have any chance of success, they must repair the damage to the relationship between their team and their community. That mission starts now, let’s see what happens.
