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The Nifty #12: We've got ourselves quite the multi-billion dollar pickle...

Happy Tuesday!

Hot tip: If you don’t read today’s email, check out today’s podcast episode. It’s an experiment and only 7 minutes.

The last week has been absolutely crazy in the world of NFTs. Despite crypto’s continued bear market, there is no slowing in the world of NFT collectibles.

Like the days of the Million Dollar Homepage in which a slew of copycats launched immediately after the creator’s success the same thing is happening in NFT collectibles. Dozens of fast followers have seen the success of Bored Ape Yacht Club and have jumped on board. In the past week alone we’ve seen:

  • Wicked Craniums - A bunch of well designed skull heads.
  • My F*cking Pickle - Which is literally 9,999 identical pickles and 1 golden pickle.
  • Pirate Treasure Booty Club - A bunch of pirate avatars randomly generated.
  • Slumdog Billionaries - 10,000 programmatically generated dogs that look like the official Doge meme.

New NFT collectibles

It’s not exactly surprising that we’ve seen this surge. Bored Ape Yacht Club experienced over $20 million in secondary sales just in the past week driven largely by the launch of a new project that was free for all ape owners: Bored Ape Kennel Club. In my case, I received two dogs for my two apes with each one currently valued at 1.3 ETH or $2,340 which is pretty bonkers considering that I did nothing beyond own an ape.

As I went walking with my fiancée this weekend I turned to her and said, “I have a portfolio of apes and dog images worth $25,000, I should probably sell some of it.” It then got as high as $32,000 over the weekend but is now hovering at around $22,000 which really is non-sensical. She thought I should hold on so I guess I’m putting these images into my retirement portfolio 🤣

So what is one to do with this knowledge? For myself, nothing. You have to spend the day on Twitter and Discord in order to monitor the drops and try to flip them quickly after launch.

For my friend Nick who was previously on the podcast, that approach is basically generating a full-time income at this point. He also owns 15% of the supply of pickles which frankly is just absurd to me…

I on the other hand have a job and don’t have time to become a degenerate NFT speculator (despite my strong desire to).

While it’s easy to point and make fun of the absolute ludicrousness of this situation, the reality is that profile photos are a multi-billion dollar industry. Not all NFT collectibles are profile photos but the vast majority are.

This begs the question: is this sustainable? My shocking conclusion: YES! While I don’t think the average profile photo will be priced at $30,000, I think that there will continue to be an upper tier of the market and that’s where it’s starting.

If you think about it, a lot of new technology (like televisions) begins at the high end so why not avatars?

If this sounds bonkers to you, how much do you think will be spent on in-game fashion items globally this year? If you guessed $129 billion you’d be correct 🤯

That’s the size that L’Atelier BNP Paribas estimates will be spent this year alone. So if the market for profile photo avatars is currently at a $1 or $2 billion run rate I’d argue there’s A LOT more room for growth as people are spending a ton of their time on social media.

As somebody who doesn’t want to sell their ape photo despite the price, I definitively say that the avatar becomes you and you become your avatar (fortunately I’m not acting like a monkey most of the time…)

Podcast Updates

I have been on a tear with the podcast recently and have been lining up a lot of awesome guests (many of which are soon to be announced).

Despite my guests, I tried something new today and published an editorial podcast episode. It’s about a copyright debacle that happened over the weekend with the bored apes. I pulled on a lawyer as well as community members for commentary. It’s 7 minutes long so take a listen and let me know what you think!

You can listen to the Burnt Ape Yacht Club episode here.

I’ll be back to publishing interview episodes starting tomorrow. The full list of upcoming guests is posted in this tweet from Sunday:

I’ll see you next week!

~Nick