From an overall point of view, the current sub-fields of collections, artworks, virtual worlds, and games are the most popular among giant whale players, and the value growth space is higher, but this also means that the application competition of these same types of scenes will be more intense.
Text | Nancy
Niche NFTs are breaking into the mainstream world. Recently, Christie's, a world-renowned art auction house, announced that it will auction the NFT (non-homogeneous token) work "Everydays – The First 5000 Days" created by artist Beeple. This will be the first auction to be offered by a large auction house. Supported pure digital artwork.
When the traditional boundary was broken, the current trendy "blind box" gameplay collided with NFT. The market sentiment was raging, and investors from all walks of life started a "buy, buy, buy" model. For example, NBA Top shot, Hashmasks, etc. quickly went out of the circle, and they were once sold out.
Small innovations are often a big step in ecological expansion. With all kinds of novel gameplay, applications such as encrypted art, collectibles, domain names, virtual worlds, and games have also shown a trend of exponential growth, and transaction volume and transaction volume have also increased. In the past year alone, the transaction volume of the NFT market has increased by nearly 25 times. For example, the transaction volume of Decentraland, Cryptopunks, CryptoKitties, SuperRare, Sorare, etc. is even the best in the NFT.
When all kinds of scenes bloomed everywhere, more and more high-net-worth NFT collectors also broke into the NFT world. To this end, PANews counted some active collectors to see which NFTs are more popular? What are the major trends that cannot be ignored? It is undeniable that these collectors are not only hobbyists, but also prescient “investors”.
0xb1
0xb1 is a veritable DeFi whale. Although it is just an account that has only been created for more than 5 months, it has DeFi tokens worth more than 30,000 ETH. 0xb1 is not only active in various DeFi protocols, but also interested in NFT.
Not long ago, in order to commemorate the participating ROOK, DIGG, YFL, YAX, UNI and 1INCH DeFi projects, 0xb1 took out up to 150,000 US dollars in prize money for the NFT commemorative competition. In January of this year, 0xb1 also bid for a very rare CryptoPunk collection at a high price of 600 ETH, but ultimately failed.
From the data of OpeaSea, 0xb1 has purchased 88 NFTs of 16 projects, of which NFTrees and Hashmasks have the most collections.
Based on the Telos blockchain, NFTrees is a project where investors need to pay for the trees planted and are rewarded based on the amount of carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere. The number of NFTrees owned by 0xb1 accounts for 36% of all NFTs. Among all the NFTrees collected by 0xb1, the No. 45 collection has the highest price, and the current price is 25 ETH.
Hashmasks is a digital art collection project based on Ethereum. More than 70 artists around the world have created 16,384 unique digital portraits. Users can purchase these portraits and name them. Since each Hashmasks is composed of various elements such as character, mask type, eye color, skin color, etc., different elements also represent different rarities. Currently 0xb1 has 21 Hashmasks NFTs, among which the 1432th collectible "Coinbase" has the highest price, and the current price is 88.8 ETH.
In addition, 0xb1 recently purchased three CryptoPunk collections at a price of 130 ETH each; purchased the joint "BTC Whitepaper" of MEME and Badger due to the DeFi liquidity mining fire for 88.8 ETH; purchased it for 65 ETH NBA Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire Mark Cuban sold and created two same-version encrypted art NFTs at Rarible, and destroyed one of the NFTs after purchase, reducing it from the original tenth version to the ninth version.
Interestingly, encryption artist Beeple sold three open-version encrypted art NFTs at Nifty Gateway, which were all packaged and bought by 0xb1 recently at a price of 333.666 ETH, and these NFTs will no longer be sold.
WhaleShark
In the real world, a Whale Shark with a mouth as wide as 1.5 meters can suck all kinds of prey in a storm like a vacuum cleaner. NFT also has a "big stomach king whale shark", WhaleShark has been collecting NFT since 2019.
At that time, WhaleShark was deeply attracted by the works of crypto artist Yura Miron and began to buy his works in large quantities. To express his gratitude, Yura Miron sent a screenshot of the email reminding WhaleShark to purchase his work to the digital art platform SuperRare, and this screenshot was also collected by WhaleShark.
Since then, WhaleShark has started to sweep goods on platforms such as SuperRare, Knownorigin, Makersplace, Opensea, and CryptoVoxels. The SupeRare platform shows that WhaleShark has 507 encrypted art works. Among them, the works of giantSwan, VRHUMAN, Undeadlu, Hexagon Truth and other encrypted artists are being paid attention to and collected by WhaleShark.
In addition, WhaleShark is also one of the largest rare card collectors of Gods Unchained, a card tactical game based on Ethereum. According to OpeaSea's data, among the 14,514 NFTs in its 46 projects, Gods Unchained accounts for 95% of all NFTs.
In addition to collecting NFTs, WhaleShark has long been committed to the development of the NFT field. In 2020, WhaleShark launched the WHALE token and established the NFT vault (The Vault). In WHALE, creators can mortgage valuable NFT as collateral to obtain tokens. WhaleShark directly purchases NFT from the 20,000 WHALE tokens in the total supply.
It is worth mentioning that recently this avid collector has started to make big purchases on the blazing NFT collection game NBA Top Shot. As of the publication, WhaleShark's two NBA Top Shot accounts hold a total of 9,550 Moment, with a total valuation of 19.728 million US dollars.
Metakovan
Metakovan is an Ethereum giant whale and NFT collector. As early as May 2019, the NFT token representing the first digital F1 car was sold for a record-breaking price of $110,000, and the buyer was Metakovan.
But this is not Metakovan's most expensive "shopping". Not long ago, the NFT fund Metapurse, funded by Metakovan, purchased 20 sets of collections from "Beeple Everydays: The 2020 Collection" (the 2020 works) on Nifty Gateway for a sky-high price of $2.2 million.
In fact, the uniqueness of NFT and the accompanying story are very attractive to Metakovan. OpeaSea data shows that Metakovan holds a total of 854 NFTs for 15 projects, and The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels and Somnium Space VR account for 94.9% of the total. Among them, The Sandbox is the most, with a total of 576 pieces of virtual land.
Like WhaleShark, Metakovan is also a loyal fan of Cryptovoxels, with 129 Cryptovoxels NFTs. Cryptovoxels is a user-owned virtual world built on Ethereum. Users can buy or sell land to build anything they want. The closer the "land" is to the center, the higher the value. Previously, WhaleShark provided free land for crypto artists to fully demonstrate their talents, and also published a participation tutorial to lower their participation threshold. In Metakovan's Cryptovoxels NFT, the price of the land named "3 Scrum Trace" is as high as 7.4 ETH, and the price has increased by 289.4% in the past one and a half months.
Somnium Space VR is an Ethereum-based VR social application launched in 2018. Users can buy land, build or import objects to create a shared virtual world. At this stage Metakovan has purchased 106 Somnium Space NFTs, with the highest price of 64.4 ETH.
Pranksy
Some people say that Pranksy's OpenSea account and Ethereum address are equivalent to a "NFT development history", which is not an exaggeration at all.
In the past three years of the Chinese New Year, Pranksy has achieved a wealth of millions of dollars by virtue of its extraordinary activity in the NFT. In 2020, Pranksy also had a semi-open competition with his old friend Nate. Whoever can get a profit of 1000 ETH in the NFT transaction will win, and NBA Top Shot has become the key to its victory. Currently, Pranksy still has a star card worth more than $3 million.
According to OpenSea data, Pranksy has purchased a total of 26,198 NFTs from 128 projects, of which 16,782 Gods Unchained cards make Pranksy and WhaleShark equal.
As an early player, Pranksy's first NFT game was CryptoKitties. So far, Pranksy has collected 2,167 crypto kits from this popular game. However, except for the CryptoKitties named "Founder Cat #73", which sells for up to 49 ETH, most of them are still at lower prices.
Pranksy is also very fond of encryption art. At present, most of the art works in its collection come from the generative art project ChainFaces and the generative chain art project Avastars, with a total of 3445 works.
In addition to buying NFTs frantically, drawing on the successful precedent of NBA Top Shot, which integrates blind box gameplay, Pranksy recently launched the NFT blind box project NFTBox, which will be issued in limited quantities every month. The NFTs in the blind box are carefully crafted by Pranksy The selected ones are based on Pranksy's personal reputation and experience.
Maxstealth
Maxstealth is an anonymous NFT collector and a rather "hardcore" superhero fan. In addition to expressing his love for superheroes without hesitation on Twitter, he also bought relevant NFTs.
For example, in mid-October 2020, a group of encrypted artworks with Batman as the theme was acquired by Maxstealth at a high price of 540.86 ETH. Not only that, the mysterious collector also took another Batman artwork "Who Is The Creator 2" for 150 ETH.
In addition to the Batman series NFT, OpenSea data shows that Maxstealth also collected 814 NFTs from 35 projects. Among them, the domain name system Unstoppable Domains based on Ethereum accounted for the most, with the highest NFT of 227 ETH. As a decentralized domain name project that allows users to replace encrypted currency addresses with readable addresses without being censored, according to NonFungible data, its average price is $119.7. According to Maxstealth holding 8.1% of its total sales and the average price, the total value of Unstoppable Domains owned by Maxstealth is at least more than US$440,000.
Compared with domain names, Maxstealth's purchasing power in encrypted artworks is even more exponential. On SuperRare, Maxstealth purchased a total of 85 NFTs, with a price of 70 ETH for works named "Elephant Dreams"; on Hashmasks, Maxstealth bought 83 digital artworks, with the most valuable works priced at 28.1 ETH; at Makersplace Above, Maxstealth has 78 works, of which the two groups of Batman encrypted artworks mentioned above sell for the highest price.
In addition, Maxstealth has many NFTs in the virtual game world The Sandbox, CryptoDrinks, Meme and other applications.
From an overall point of view, the current sub-fields of collections, artworks, virtual worlds, and games are the most popular among giant whale players, and the value growth space is higher, but this also means that the application competition of these same types of scenes will be more intense. Innovative gameplay such as "blind box" and "liquidity mining" that break the inherent thinking is becoming the driving force for the project to stand out. At the same time, factors such as scarcity, well-known IP blessing, and even wealth effect are also being largely affected The project development plays a role in icing on the cake.
At the same time, one of the larger problems that NFT is still facing at this stage is the imperfect infrastructure. Judging from the applications participated by various collectors, most projects are active on Ethereum, while other smart contract platforms are few and far between. With the gradual improvement of the current NFT infrastructure construction, it may pave the way for the next wave of NFT craze, and it will also make it a force that cannot be ignored in the encryption world to enter the real world.