It's time for the whitelist system to change.
Author: Planet Little Flower
Produced by | Odaily Planet Daily (ID:o-daily)
A few days ago, a friend asked me: I haven't paid attention to NFTs for several months, why are you still grabbing PFP?
I also retorted: there is now a lot of out-of-circle traffic influx, giants have entered the market, applications have blossomed everywhere... But think about it carefully, for an ordinary investor involved in NFTs, the most time is indeed still to research and grab new small pictures, after all, who does not want to be a diamond hand, buy the next BAYC boring ape?
However, in recent times, I have felt more and more that the liver is not up and cannot be rolled up.
First of all, the popular project Public Sale's Gas War is no longer a battlefield for ordinary players, and the scientists who write scripts have begun to roll each other; secondly, the threshold of the whitelist is getting higher and higher, chatting, pulling people's heads, doing two creations, the liver may not be available for several weeks, the whitelist over-the-counter market transaction is even more chaotic, the pricing is all based on the head, and even the scandal of the well-known community MOD that is full of money; most importantly, after tossing a large circle, it may not be able to make money.
According to NFTScan data, in the past 7 days, more than 840,000 NFTs have been born on the Ethereum chain, and many projects have been reduced to on-chain garbage just after birth.
On the surface, most of the community's active NFT projects are still hot and will not be "broken", but in the process of project sale, the mint price is often only the tip of the iceberg of the cost, counting the "hidden cost", many recent popular projects have actually begun to "break".
Rolled to the end, covered with water is difficult to harvest
First of all, let's talk about the "scientist volume scientist", taking one of the most popular projects in recent times (Opensea 7-day trading volume ranking first) Karafuru as an example, according to Twitter user @sethwizard0x statistics, the average gas cost of scientists is more than 4.57 ETH, calculated at 2 NFT per person mint, plus the mint price of 0.2 ETH, each cost is 2.48 ETH.
@sethwizard0x Available
The current floor price of Karufuru is 3 ETH, and it once fell to about 2.3 ETH on the day of opening the box, which shows that scientists are not a stable business, not to mention that Karafuru is one of the best performing projects in recent times. The myth of scientists who previously made a fortune from the mint NFT program is long gone.
Let's talk about the whitelist (WL), there have been many articles that have described how difficult it is to grab a whitelist today.
The whitelist system began to rise in the third quarter of 2021, the essence is to fairly reward "labor is wealth", reward members who contribute to the community and pull traffic, common including rewarding high-frequency users who speak, encouraging new users for the community, encouraging erchuang and meme, KOL cooperation, rewarding users who win in answer puzzle games, community activities, and lottery.
At first, the whitelisting mechanism was able to effectively motivate community activists and alleviate the Gas War of the Public Round, but soon things changed, and the NFT community of thousands of people and 10,000 people in Discord in the early days was already active, and it was not difficult to be an active user to get a whitelist.
With the explosion of NFT, especially after PhantaBear was replaced by Jay Chou as a avatar, a number of star blessings, and soaring prices, a large number of new Chinese people poured in, and now the new project Discord has tens of thousands of people who are ordinary, and there are hundreds of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people.
So the liver white list has a complete industrial chain, there are a large number of "studios" that specialize in obtaining the white list, hiring college students to chat and pull people's heads, hiring painters to paint, writing programs to brush activity, which are the most basic, and even perform eighteen talents, sell miserably to the project side, and recently there is a live performance to eat... It's a lot of things.
Screenshots circulating in the community
It's time for the whitelist system to change
Most of the individuals on the liver to the whitelist regard it as a treasure and will wait for their own mint, and the whitelist studios that have paid a lot of human and technical costs will often choose to make money before the mint, and naturally there will be a whitelist secondary market and an over-the-counter trading community with clear prices.
Some projects began boycotting whitelist studios, trying to find these wallet addresses and culling them.
But there is a demand for the market, before the people who bought the white list at least have a certain amount of room to make money, but recently began to lose money on a large scale.
For example, HYPEBEARS is one of the recent unheated projects, Discord people more than 360,000, Twitter fans 240,000, from this data can be seen that the liver a white list is not simple, the price of the pre-sale off-site whitelist is also speculated to more than 1 ETH, the highest floor after the sale to 1.6 ETH, after opening the box, the price has fallen all the way to the lowest 0.2 ETH.
Not only in the second level of the blood loss, buy whitelist blood loss, even mint (mint price 0.4 ETH) people have begun to lose money.
HYPEBEARS Oepnsea price trends
The failure of HYPEBEARS also exposes another problem, now NFTs from mint to unpacking usually take a few days, unpacking has become a demarcation point, in the early stage, everyone can only sneak-top in the community to see what the project looks like, and a large number of unpacking often appears unsatisfactory "true appearance".
Many project parties rushed ducks to the shelves, in order to seize the heat of the line, shoddy, propaganda when the ceiling is falling, talk about how cutting-edge trends in design, open the box can obviously be seen that it is to find some painters overnight to rush to work, without any respect for the market.
HYPEBEARS is called "ugly to refresh the three views", "visual garbage", "not as good as Taobao artists", completely in line with market expectations. Originally thought it was a GIF, finally static, originally thought it was advanced 3D, and finally a lump of plasticine.
HypeBEARS Opensea screenshot
The meme meme meme of hypebears popular in the community
In addition, when we open the blind box, we always expect to be able to open a rare model, hold 1/1 in hand, and become a diamond hand, but most of the time it is the floor.
In response to this problem, Odaily Planet Daily has also discussed with industry insiders before, in fact, the project side is likely to adjust the random number, ordinary players will skip those numbers when mint, and even they can modify the metadata to make your rare model into a normal model.
It is always the average investor who gets hurt
In addition, the release of NFTs and the operation of the enthusiast community are mostly carried out in the form of DAO, most people are anonymous, most communities will also use Mod (moderator: administrator) for daily communication and maintenance, when there is a dispute of interest, it is often a chicken feather, and it is not uncommon to tear up.
Recently, 9x9x9, a core contributor to the well-known NFT KOL, 721 CLUB and OpenDAO, sent several tweets in a row, accusing former Mod of using the Club721 and OpenDAO brands to obtain a whitelist of community cooperation, and filled his pockets, leaving most of it to himself, such as CoolMan, who talked about 100 whitelist collaborations, and finally only 30 community draws.
The former Mod quickly counterattacked, saying that 9x9x9 drove away the 721 digital former Mod, the dove occupied the magpie's nest, and exposed his real identity as Qu Jiawei , the CEO of the Yide Exchange who ran away after the 2019 ICO, and asked the NFT project parties to stop cooperating with OpenDAO. After 9x9x9, it was denied and said it would continue to remain anonymous.
Whether it is right or wrong, or what the real situation is, this not only exposes the difficulty of DAO governance in the face of profit distribution, but also reflects the degree of chaos in today's NFT market.
The "white list" is like a black box, it is difficult to say who got it, who is profiting, and how many black box operations are still dirty.
As an ordinary NFT enthusiast who takes over the plate at the second level, it is easy to feel tired after being cut several times, tired, forget it.
It's hard not to think of the once-popular IEO and IDO. Initially, the platform carefully selected, the number of projects is small, the number of investors is more, grab is to earn, long-term holding can be doubled by dozens or even hundreds of times; later the dividend gradually weakened, the frequency became higher, grabbed can still be several times, but many of the online is the peak, most people choose to sell on the line; finally to the extent that even participation in the IDO may be cut, broken projects are not uncommon.
In this process, there are also cases of rat warehouses on the project side and even conflicts of interest with the trading platform.
The last to be injured is always the average investor. The market that loses ordinary investors will gradually be drained of vitality, projects are intertwined, and development stagnates, and we have experienced this cycle too many times.
NFT is an early market full of prospects, there are many conscientious projects and quality teams, but also full of countless chaos and scams, it is time to go further with the protection of retail investors by the system and platform of project issuance.