Moonbirds explained in a way you’ll understand

READ TIME: ±6 minutes

Welcome to NFT Insider for April 22nd 2022 – FREE Edition, brought to you weekly by Alts.

Each week, we give you our analysis of the NFT market and any current IPOs, plus a heads up on cool projects we think are worth checking out.

In this post we explain why the world has gone nuts over Moonbirds. Also, why Meta shouldn’t be the only one on the naughty step for ripping people off… turns out Roblox should be sitting there with them. For double the time.

Let’s go!

NFTs in 2022

Our weekly index shows that NFTs on the fractional marketplace enjoyed about a 5-6% bump. Some of this can be traced to the floor price for Bored Apes and Mutant Apes rising, which now stands at $396k and $106k, respectively.

Price data taken from the fractional platforms Rally and Otis

The 30-day daily sales volume chart on Nonfungible.com shows that daily sales on Monday, April 18, topped $45 million for the first time since April 3rd. The increase in sales can be attributed to the release of Moonbirds.

The Moonbirds project has an impressive team behind it, including Kevin Rose, one of the most popular voices in the NFT space. Moonbirds has become the 10th highest-traded NFT in OpenSea history in less than one week.

NFT Daily Sales Volume (30 days). Courtesy of NonFungible.com

NFTs Last Week

NFTs on Fractional Marketplaces

Mutant Ape #9114 on Rally still has an open offering, with 14% of shares unfilled. With the current floor price at $105k and a market cap of $87.5k, the asset is offered at a 17% discount. Part of the reason this Ape has gone unfilled, in our opinion, is that it was stealth dropped alongside the highly anticipated “Glowing Eyes” Azuki #6704, which sold out in minutes.

“Leather Jacket” Bored Ape #9159 ($300k market cap) is sitting at a market cap below the floor price of $395k. “Astronaut” Bored Ape #7359 is also sitting below floor price at a $323k market cap.

NFTs on OpenSea (and a big Moonbirds explainer)

This week has been all about the Moonbirds.

So what are the Moonbirds, who created them, and how in the world has the project already reached a floor of 18 ETH in less than a week?

Moonbirds was launched by the PROOF Collective, a 1,000-member collective made up of NFT enthusiasts and artists. Membership into the Collective is gained through the PROOF Collective NFT, essentially a pass into the club. The floor price for one of these passes is currently 84 ETH ($260k).

This is Proof that I know nothing.

Some of the perks for PROOF members have included IRL (in real life) meetups, access to the PROOF Podcast guests, and free limited-edition NFTs created by artists such as Mike Shinoda, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Larva Labs. Now the PROOF Collective is allowing others to join its club through the Moonbirds.

Owning a Moonbird gives holders access to the private PROOF Discord chat, Moonbird-related drops, real-life events, and future PROOF projects.

On top of that, the developers are Kevin Rose, Ryan Carson, and Justin Mezzell. Rose is one of the most well-known voices in the NFT space and is currently a partner at the venture capital firm, True Ventures. Rose’s podcast regularly hosts the most influential people in the NFT space.

What are they doing with the funds raised from the Moonbirds drop? Investing it all back into the PROOF Collective and its community.

You talkin’ to me?

There’s no doubt that Moonbirds stole the show this week, but if you look at the 3rd and 4th spots on the OpenSea weekly, you see two familiar names – the Bored Apes and the Mutants.

A few weeks ago, Azuki made headlines when the project flipped the Mutant Apes. That didn’t last long. Unsubstantiated rumors that Yuga Labs was readying a public sale for land to its metaverse, “The Otherside,” sent Twitter in a frenzy.

The price of ApeCoin has skyrocketed, and Bored Apes and Mutant Apes have reached all-time high floor prices. Other collections, presumed to be partners with Yuga, have also seen their values rise with speculation that holders from certain projects like Cool Cats and Nouns will receive whitelists for The Otherside.

The Weekly OpenSea Top 12 – Moonbirds at the top, but look at the Apes!

NFTs This Week

Fractional Marketplaces

There are no IPOs of fractionalized assets this week.

Projects Minting

When we highlight minting projects, we are not endorsing the project but highlighting a few reasons why the project has the potential to be successful. How do we define success? We define a successful project as one that you can mint and sell for a profit or one where you hold and benefit from its utility.

This week, we have a pair of friendly, “good vibes” collections to look at.

Imaginary Ones

Date: Wednesday, April 27th @ 11 PM ET Price: Unknown; Dutch Auction

  • The starting price for the Dutch Auction is not yet known, but Imaginary Ones has a great deal of hype surrounding it, with 500k Twitter followers.
  • The developers are experienced 3D animators with strong business acumen stemming from previous work with well-known brands.
  • Future plans include starting a metaverse, introducing a utility token, and getting Imaginary Ones vehicles to traverse across various metaverses.
  • Dutch auctions can be tricky, so make sure you price this asset accordingly and maybe wait until the secondary market opens.
Imaginary Ones is run by fully doxxed studio creatives.

Projects worth looking at

The Littles

Price: 0.26 ETH Floor Price on OpenSea

  • The Littles has partnered with CyberKongz, SupDucks, Kaiju Kingz, and Cool Cats.
  • In March, TIME Studios announced it was creating an original children’s series based on the littles NFT.
  • The co-founder, Wil, works on this project full-time, and this definitely shows through the partnerships created and the project’s development.
  • If you want to learn more about the littles and their founder, Wil, here’s a great podcast from the First Mint.
No serious grown ups allowed.

Industry News

Last week, there was a lot of outrage when Meta announced it would be charging creators nearly 50% in commissions for sales in the Meta marketplace – Horizon Worlds. I had a vague idea that Meta had released its own metaverse “digiscape,” but I hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Boy, did that change.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t Meta that I cared to learn more about, but another world-building metaverse that’s the most popular gaming platform globally – Roblox. Lost in the uproar over Meta’s fees is that, unlike marketplaces like OpenSea and LooksRare (which charge creators 2.5% and 2% of all sales), Meta operates on an entirely different business model.

For one, Meta already has a functioning metaverse and is more than a secondary marketplace. On Horizon Worlds, you will be able to buy any number of products and use them directly in their metaverse – whether those are clothing, experiences, or weapons for shooting games.

The closest comparison to what Meta is (and strives to be) is Roblox, which -get this- charges its creators about 87% in commissions (!). Professional creators who have somehow managed to get their games noticed among the more than 20 million games in the Roblox ecosystem are taking home about 13% of earned income!

caption for image

How is this possible? For one, Roblox charges its creators what seems to be a reasonable 30% sales fee. So how do we get to the figures above?

Roblox pays its creators in Robux, not in actual money.

Physical representation of Robux

For creators to take out their money, they need to accumulate a minimum of 100,000 Robux, equivalent to about USD 1,000. You can buy 10,000 Robux for $100 but can get more if you are a Premium member.

But here’s the truly astounding part. There’s a fee to convert Robux to dollars, and the $1,000 you thought you were entitled to… become $350.

$10,000 / Month to make games! Wait, is that 10,000 Robux or 10,000 real bucks?

How about if you never make 100,000 Robux? You’ll never be able to withdraw your money, and chances are you’ll spend your Robux back into the game.

All of this is not to defend Meta. My initial reaction to Meta’s fee announcement was… why? Why would Meta charge such exorbitant fees? But when comparing itself to Roblox, Meta comes off as a Robin Hood – “protector of the poor.”

Roblox’s business model becomes even more distasteful when you consider that most users are preteens… The Roblox corporate suits exploit the adult creators and marketers making money on the platform. But in turn, they are making money off of elementary and middle schoolers who Roblox has convinced can become money-making creators.

If 47.5% is the best creators can get from Meta’s metaverse (oi), and Roblox is at 87%, then it’s clear that there’s a need for a better alternative.

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Author

Horacio Ruiz

Horacio Ruiz

Horacio is a veteran math teacher of the New York City public school system. Prior to teaching, he lived in New Orleans where he worked in sales for the New Orleans Hornets before joining The Institute for Sport and Social Justice to rebuild homes in the Lower Ninth Ward and neighboring St. Bernard Parish. He currently lives in Staten Island with his wife, Alicia, his three sons; Oliver, Henry, and Jacob, and their pitt-mi,x Tipitina. In 2019, Horacio published a biography, The White Knight: Calvin Patterson and the Integration of Florida State University Football.

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