Remember the NFT Avatar Hype? These are the niche’s top five mistakes

The NFT avatar scene has seen many projects float and then fade into irrelevance over the past year.

NFT Avatar Space

As NFT technology became mainstream in 2021, tokenized monkeys, lizards, skeletons and other characters became popular properties on blockchains such as Ethereum and Solana. The growing demand for NFT avatars was fueled in part by the intrigue surrounding Ethereum’s first major avatar collection, CryptoPunks, and then fueled by the launch of Bored Ape Yacht Club, now the world’s most important avatar collection. People quickly realized that they would need to “wear” their own NFT on Twitter if they wanted to fit into Web3 circles, and suddenly everyone was talking about “community” as new projects did much the same as their predecessors appeared. After minting for the equivalent of around $200 in April 2021, Bored Ape Yacht Club’s floor price topped $430,000 a year later.

Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs hit a series of home runs with lucrative airdrops that enriched owners, major brand partnerships, celebrity endorsements, exclusive parties and an ambitious Metaverse gaming project, but its success was an outlier in what became a saturated one. room. During the peak of NFT craze in August 2021, demand for NFT avatars borrowed from the CryptoPunks template increased – which helped drive up prices. But the hype was short-lived, and many almost disappeared when the market returned. This feature lists the NFT avatar scene’s five biggest disappointments to date.

Meebits

On paper, Meebits seemed like a no-brainer for the NFT market’s hungriest speculators. The second avatar project from CryptoPunks creator Larva Labs, Meebits promised a collection of 20,000 unique 3D voxel characters that can be used as a digital identity to explore the Metaverse. As the successor to the main Ethereum NFT collection at the time, the entire crypto space was talking about its launch when it was announced in May 2021. However, the excitement quickly turned to derision. While Larva Labs was applauded for shipping the new Meebits to CryptoPunks holders, it quickly became clear that the collection’s art quality paled in comparison to its older siblings. Ugly designs aside, Meebits went live in a Dutch auction with bidding starting at a hefty 2.5 ETH (over $8,000 at the time). It sold out within hours, beating out Larva Labs for around $80 million. Secondary trade increased as rarer pieces sold for wild values, but the hype soon died down. Even when the floor price topped 9 ETH during the NFT summer, it was clear that Larva Labs had no plan for the collection beyond raking in eye-popping profits. The design studio was convicted of a series of blunders months later and went on to sell the rights to Meebits to Bored Ape Yacht Club’s Yuga Labs. Holders were immediately granted intellectual property rights to their characters, but as secondary trading shows, interest has waned since the peak. While CryptoPunks still have prestige in the NFT space, it is perhaps fitting that Meebits is irrelevant now; Larva Labs clearly didn’t care about the crypto space, and the crypto space doesn’t care about Meebits.

Doodles

Although Doodles was a relatively late entrant to the NFT avatar scene, it looked like a winner from the offset, combining an iconic The Simpsons-like aesthetics with world-class marketing at the forefront of its mint. It quickly became the Twitter profile picture of choice among Ethereum NFT whales, even as the broader market declined, trailing other collections’ market cycles by a few months. At its peak, Doodletown’s entry price topped $68,000, but it soon crashed like most others before it. While the Doodles still aren’t cheap, with a current floor price of around $12,000, they’ve seen a slow bleed as the reality of the project’s poor communications strategy and barely accessible roadmap sets in. In June 2022, the team announced that it had named Pharrell Williams a “chief brand officer” and closed a capital raising for an undisclosed sum, defying Web3’s transparent values. It also promised a new collection called Doodles 2, revealed it wouldn’t launch on Ethereum and teased a slick animation video. Doodles is currently running a poll for a “Triwizzy Tournament” celebrating creative talent in Web3, but the project has gone quiet on social media, last tweet at the end of July. Loyal backers must be hoping Pharrell and Doodles 2 can help the project return to its former glory.

MechaVerse

Arguably the NFT avatar space’s biggest drop to date, MekaVerse had a spectacular rally leading up to its launch in October 2021. As the crypto hype neared its peak, Forbes ran a puff piece interviewing the founders of “The NFT Project With 100k Discord Members In 48 Hours”. 8,888 Mekas went live with an initial coin followed by an art reveal, and the floor price quickly topped $28,000 on the secondary market. However, the collection took a hit when it revealed its artwork, dropping a series of lazy Transformers-inspired designs that barely offered any distinguishing features to identify one from the other. Memes abound as crypto enthusiasts joked that the collection was among the room’s least inspiring ever. Things got worse for the project as the team was accused of rigging leaks to help insiders find the rarest tokens, something the creators vehemently denied. MekaVerse has since organized another airdrop and promised some kind of Metaverse experience (MekaVerse in the Metaverse, get it?), but it’s fair to say that the collection has become irrelevant. As for the asking price for one of the Mekas cookie cutters? You can buy one for around $420 today, down 98.5% from its peak.

Cool cats

Shining a light on Cool Cat’s fall from grace probably won’t win us any friends, but this is crypto; If you really think this space is all about community, you might be as naive as the Cool Cats’ biggest purse holders. There’s no better way to understand how crypto trading (and yes, NFT trading) is a zero-sum game than to see one of your wallets close to zero, and it probably wouldn’t be unfair to say that the Cool Cats community’s most ardent believers have had something of a reality check in recent months. The cute Ethereum cats went for over $40,000 in adverse conditions back in January – now the floor price is over 90% down in dollar terms. It gets even worse when you check the chart for the collection’s MILK token, whose 99% decline rivals Terra’s LUNA (you know, the one that death spiraled to zero) for how bleak it looks. Community members have blamed the team’s slow development times for the Cooltopia world, and while it’s been promised that the current experience is “just the tip of the iceberg”, interest in the project across the wider area has all but waned. The cool cats of the NFT space are still hammering JPEGs and tweeting each other to get through the enduring bear market, but they’re just not excited about the Cool Cats anymore.

Famous Fox Federation

The Famous Fox Federation makes the bold claim that it’s “the most famous NFT collection on Solana”, so it’s hard to take it too seriously given that other collections like SolanaMonkeyBusiness and Degenerate Ape Academy have it outclassed on almost every metric. The Famous Fox Federation has a relatively substantial 53,000 Twitter followers and is approaching 200,000 SOL in lifetime trading volume on OpenSea, but there’s a lot to question when you get past the raw data. Famous Fox Federation isn’t a failure due to any price drop or lack of market appeal – it’s just another example of a boring project that offers nothing in the way of originality. Like all the worst NFT avatar collections, the foxes themselves look about as unique from each other as Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, and the team has copied the Yuga playbook by launching a derivative airdrop and a token called FOXY (don’t ask us what do or why someone needs it). SOL enthusiasts can currently enter the Foxosphere for a relatively modest $1,300, and guess what? For those who still have cash to spare, the team is selling a series of cheap items in exchange for USDC (because if you’ve fallen for the “community” vibe at this point, why not go all the way?) Alternatively, those interested can in finding out genuinely creative NFTs dig through all the amazing things happening in the generative art, photography and digital art niches. Then again, if you’re one of those people, you probably wouldn’t have considered looking at avatars like the Famous Fox Federation in the first place.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned some Otherside NFTs, ETH and several other cryptocurrencies.