OG Streetwear Designer Battles for NFT Creator Royalties
The Hundreds, co-founded by Bobby “Bobby Hundreds” Kim and Ben “Ben Hundreds” Shenassafar in 2003, were built when a sneaker message board called NikeTalk reigned supreme; when online communities gathered in chat rooms to share news of releases of the latest Air Jordans, discuss product designs and socialize with like-minded creators. Sounds familiar? It was the forerunner of today’s cryptodiscords.
Then the streetwear brand proved the old-fashioned power of customer loyalty and community when it took its first step into Web3 with the launch of an Ethereum non-fungible token (NFT) collection, the Adam Bomb Squad, in 2021. The collection of 25,000 unique NFT- is sold out in less than 40 minutes. To date, its total sales are valued at 22,000 ether (ETH), or over $25 million, and have generated over $73 million in secondary trades, according to data from CryptoSlam.
Building on this success, The Hundreds devoted considerable energy and expense to expanding its foothold in Web3.
This summer, a video of an NFT protest surfaced on Twitter. It showed an “angry” mob holding signs reading “God Hates NFTs”, “Crypto is a Sin”, “Vitalik is the Antichrist”, marching through the streets of SoHo in New York City at the start of the annual NFT.NYC- the conference. . That’s when the first waves of crypto winter snow started to fall.
While some on social media thought it was a genuine protest against NFTs, longtime fans of The Hundreds knew it was a classic guerilla marketing strategy. Again, OG Web3 showed how old-fashioned marketing is done.
So it was a shock in November when Bobby Hundreds canceled the NFT drop on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by trading volume, in protest of the NFT trading platform’s stance on creator royalties.
Many NFT creators put a secondary sales royalty on their work, usually a 5% to 10% fee paid by the retailer. Since August, NFT marketplaces X2Y2, Magic Eden, and LooksRare have clawed market share by deciding to no longer obligate buyers to pay royalties or contribute to creators. OpenSea took the middle ground in this ongoing debate.
“Abandoning royalties for creators throws off the entire mission of Web3/NFTs” so Kim in a Twitter thread.
He has been one of the most outspoken Web3 creators pushing back on OpenSea. Instead, The Hundreds moved the November launch of their new Badam Bomb Squad NFT collection to their own website.
For Kim, NFTs today have a lot to learn from decades of culture built around streetwear: While streetwear had a good decade to build its artistic appreciation and cultural foundation before resale stole the narrative, NFTs came up the opposite way – the investment value. dominated the narrative before newcomers noticed its potential as a cultural artifact.
What is more important than marketing strategies to build the cultural foundation for NFTs? The creators. Therefore, in taking a stand against 0% royalties, Kim says, “the artists are always in control.”
