The decline of NFT is now: forget the original intention of the whitelist, don't always hurt retail investors

A few days ago, a friend asked me: I haven't paid attention to NFTs for a few months, why are you still vying for PFPs?

I also refuted it: there is a lot of traffic coming from outside the circle, giants are entering the market one after another, and applications are blooming everywhere... But after thinking about it carefully, for an ordinary investor participating in NFT, the most time is indeed still research and grabbing New little picture, after all, who doesn't want to be a diamond hand and buy the next BAYC boring ape?

However, recently, I feel more and more that the liver can't afford it, and I can't roll it anymore.

First of all, the Gas War of the popular project Public Sale is no longer a battlefield for ordinary players, and the scientists who wrote the scripts have already started to write each other; secondly, the threshold of the whitelist is getting higher and higher, chatting, pulling people, doing second creation, liver for several weeks It may not be available. The whitelist OTC market transactions are even more chaotic. The pricing is all based on the head, and there are even scandals that the well-known community MODs have enriched their own pockets. The most important thing is that after a lot of tossing, 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 become garbage on the chain as soon as they are born.

On the surface, most NFT projects that are active in the community are still popular and will not "break", but in the process of project sale, the mint price is often only the tip of the iceberg of cost, including "hidden costs", many recent popular projects In fact, it has already started to "break".

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Rolling to the end, it's hard to cover

Let's talk about "scientists roll scientists" first. Take Karafuru, one of the most popular projects recently (Opensea's 7th trading volume ranked first) as an example. According to statistics from Twitter user @sethwizard0x, the average gas cost of scientists is actually more than 4.57 ETH , calculated with mint 2 NFTs per person, plus the mint price of 0.2 ETH, the cost of each is 2.48 ETH.

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Courtesy of @sethwizard0x

The current floor price of Karufuru is 3 ETH, and it once dropped to about 2.3 ETH on the day of opening the box. It can be seen that being a scientist is not a business that can make a profit, not to mention that Karafuru is one of the best-performing projects recently. The myth of scientists who got rich by mint NFT projects is long gone.

Let's talk about the whitelist (WL). There have been many articles about how difficult it is to grab a whitelist these days.

The whitelist system began to emerge in the third quarter of 2021. The essence is to reward "labor is wealth" fairly, and reward members who contribute to the community and drive traffic. Common ones include rewarding high-frequency users, incentives to attract new people to the community, and encouragement Erchuang cooperates with meme, KOL, rewards users who win in quiz-solving games, community activities, lottery, etc.

At first, the whitelist mechanism could effectively motivate the active members of the community and alleviate the Gas War of Public Round, but things changed soon. In the early days of Discord, the NFT community with several thousand people and ten thousand people was already active, so be an active user. Getting a whitelist is not difficult.

With the explosion of NFTs, especially after PhantaBear was replaced by Jay Chou's avatar, a group of stars blessed, and prices soared, a large number of new Chinese people flowed in. Today's new project Discord has tens of thousands of people who are ordinary, and ten thousand people. There are not a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

As a result, the liver whitelist has a complete industry chain, and a large number of "studios" specializing in obtaining the whitelist have appeared. They employ college students to chat and pull people, hire painters to paint, and write programs to check their activity. These are the most basic, and even There are those who perform 18 kinds of talents, those who sell miserably to the project side, and those who have a live performance recently ?... It can be said that there is nothing to do.