With increasing saturation of the NFT marketplace comes increasing demand for innovation. ‘Utility’ is the first word that heads to mind for most; How does a project ensures that their NFT differentiates from the multiple launches beside them, especially if their art-style concepts are similar?
The recent Hawksight Debonair launch has caught quite a stir among the community, with the public mint having sold out within a minute alone. Their NFTs promise exclusive access to features & their tokens at IDO price — seemingly inspired by Shadowy Super Coders.
As such, today, we will delve into 3 chosen projects: Taiyo Robotics, Stoned Ape Crew and Degen Ape Academy. This article aim to go through briefly on their strategies in remaining sustainable over time, with statistics.
#1) Taiyo Robotics
A total of 2,121 Taiyo Robotics was released on the 21st of November 2021, with a mint cost of 1 SOL each.
This NFT project was first started by a different group of developers who are not the current founders. Their roadmap was ambitious, but the team then did not expect the huge success it gotten and felt like they were incapable of delivering their promises. Tom Solport offered to buy the project as a whole and ended acquiring it.
He was initially quite involved with the original founders since the beginning, making the transfer of ownership a seamless process. Taiyo Robotics is now run by him and his team, of which they then pushed out 2 different roadmaps.
Users who minted the NFT were entitled to benefits like:
- Custom Marketplace to revamp Taiyo’s look, breeding
- Sub-Affiliate business referrals under Taiyo
- Staking NFTs for $SCRAP yields
The total volume for $SCRAP tokens for the first 5 days in March amounted to a total of 12,305,211!
With extra purposes like breeding, the team made sure constant value accrued for the $SCRAP token — of which is currently ranging above $4. Not only was it incentivising to continue holding the NFT, the entire experience was made engaging with new features and elements.
#2) Stoned Ape Crew
The Stoned Ape Crew first launched the 28th of November with a total of 4,200 collectibles at the price of 0.69 SOL. The NFT collection was created by weed enthusiasts, with 50% of pieces spread across 4 roles: Scientists, Businessmen, Farmers and Artists. The other half is made out of Chimpions that can gain new traits or roles after combining them with native tokens called $PUFF.
On the 27th of February, there was a huge upshot in volume amounting to ~74 billion $PUFF tokens!
The demand for the $PUFF token can be attributed from two functions:
- In order for Chimpions to evolve, it will take a total of 333~666 $PUFF to evolve NFTs according to user’s preference.
- Holders of the NFTs can also stake their NFTs to earn $PUFF. Depending on the roles they get, this will allow users to earn different amount of $PUFF. Normal Chimpions generally earn a lesser amount of $PUFF daily as compared to their colleagues with jobs.
Additionally, apart from staking and generating traits, $PUFF tokens can also be burned to created to create their sub-set NFTs called Nuked Apes. Nuked Apes was first launched on the 19th of January, 2021.
There was a total of 2,618 new wallets created on that day, with current daily figures ranging on the ~100 mark.
It was reported that Nuked Apes can earn 169 $PUFF/day in yields.
In future, aside from these current integrations, the team is also planning to build an open market for stoner items and a DAO structure for future proposals. Stoned Ape Crew created a safe haven community for weed lovers and also introduced various integrations to financially motivate their holders to keep their NFTs — which are huge reasons as to why they are one of the most successful NFT projects on Solana today.
#3) Degen Ape Academy
The Degen Apes first launched with 10,000 collectibles on the 15th of August, 2021. With a mint cost of 6 SOL, the project still quickly sold out within a matter of minutes.
Users who minted the NFT were entitled to benefits like:
- Access to the DAO Academy, with student council members elected as ambassadors to run the community proposals
- Community funds to support future endeavours in academy projects, charity and any expansion efforts e.g breeding
- DAOO members can earn passive income by staking SOL via (Degen Infrastructure Core Services) validator node, promising 6–7% APY with a 0.01 SOL minimum staking amount.
On the first week of March, the average amount of blocks validated per day resulted in ~34.
Taking the total figure of validator rewards and dividing it across the total number of stakers, we calculated an average amount of ~0.0006 SOL rewards.
Degen Ape Academy’s goals were pretty simple given the ‘principles of friendship making, crayon eating and absolute, unregulated, deplorable, degenerate behaviour,’ encapsulating their simple mission of community.
Despite the focus on their initial goals, they also understood that they had to continually innovate on aspects such as setting up the validator node and working towards building a Metaverse for their users.
Conclusion
All in all, it seems like some of the common uses of utility most projects approach lie between exclusive access to features, staking rewards and token airdrops. Question is, who will be the next one to introduce a revolutionary idea?
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