According to the latest data from Ouke Cloud Chain, the total number of ETH destroyed by Ethereum currently exceeds 500,000 ETH, and the destruction rate is 5.21 ETH/min; and the three protocols with the top three current destruction of ETH are OpenSea 74,200 ETH, Uniswap V2 27,100 ETH and ERC-20 USDT 23,700 ETH. The NFT trading platform OpenSea is far ahead of the ethereum chain applications.
In openSea's trading volume, CryptoPunk and Ape (BAYC plus MAYC) are in the top two. This shows that avatars are currently the mainstream of the NFT market. More than half of OpenSea's top 100 NFTs are avatar-like NFTs.
We believe that avatar NFTs have formed a good business model and chain:
Trend concept creation, well-known artist design, limited purchase (mint), buyer replacement to avatar, buyer formation community, marketing (such as inviting celebrities to change avatars), trading profits, airdropping other avatars or accessories, mining using NFTs, puzzle solving, games, etc.
Avatar class NFTs are different from the traditional cryptocurrency industry project logic. Traditional cryptocurrency projects are more like stock securities, while avatar-like NFTs are like fashion clothing + collectibles online.
Back to the source, the avatar is essentially the "face" or "clothes" of the Internet world. The difference is that this costume will not be damaged. Its biggest problem is that it can be easily copied/plagiarized, and the blockchain helps it complete the confirmation of rights, so it becomes collectible, circulating, and profitable.
To sum up, what kind of avatar class NFTs are easy to succeed?
First, there are well-known artists and IP with their own traffic participating in the production or initiation, with exquisite design and rich concepts. The most important thing is: let people be willing to replace this NFT with their own avatar; second, the herd effect driven by celebrities and big coffee is critical, Punk and Ape have a large number of crypto industry big coffee and celebrities involved, and the avatar appears in the most frequent advertising; third, there is a money-making effect, there are investors involved in frequent transactions, there is room for profit, and now some NFT investment communities have been formed.
Regarding the future of avatar NFTs, it is still too early to talk about the meta-universe, and social media is the main battlefield of avatar NFTs. So Twitter's announcement of the NFT verification feature is critical:
Mada Aflak, a software engineer at Twitter Spaces, publicly demonstrated a video in which users can click on their avatar to select an NFT from their crypto wallet, download the NFT from OpenSea, a popular digital collectibles marketplace, put the NFT image into their avatar, and then Twitter's profile will automatically generate a "blue marker" to indicate that they are the NFT The true owner of the image. ”
In the future, if Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Telegram and other giant social software have successively increased this function, and even Chinese social software such as Weibo, WeChat, DingTalk and so on have also increased this function (of course, it is more likely to use its own alliance chain rather than public chain), then the avatar NFT may usher in a big outbreak.
Of course, this is just a beautiful vision. The biggest difficulty that avatar NFTs face is whether it will be too limited to a small circle and eventually shrink slowly.
The positive news is that major auction houses and traditional artists are very actively exploring this field. The bad news is that the vast majority of online users are still unwilling to pay for an avatar and have no copyright awareness. One of the controversial points is whether copyright is just and in line with the trend and law in the Internet world and the encrypted world.