This past year we have seen the explosive rise of new NFT’s, doing millions in volume. But pioneering projects like CryptoPunks and Unisocks have been around for much longer and have left their mark on crypto culture. This article goes into everything on Unisocks, its history and metrics. All data mentioned can be found in THIS dashboard.
Unisocks were created on May 9, 2019 as an ERC-20 that allows you to convert the token to a physical pair of socks. The $SOCKS tokens were deposited in an Uniswap liquidity pool, meaning the price for 1 $SOCKS (one pair of socks) is dynamic and will rise as demand goes up. The initial price on May 9th was $12, and it has been widely popular reaching a peak of around $164k on August 9, 2021. The all-time price graph looks like many of the successful OG tokens, with the first period the graph looking flat and appearing to trade close to zero because of the huge increase in price over time.
As the trading price started at only $12 and reached a peak of $164k, trading and holding $SOCKS would have been hugely profitable over the years. The graph below shows the return on investment when bought on a certain date vs the current $SOCKS price. The returns when buying $SOCKS the first two years are astronomical, as it was trading below $1k till the end of 2020:
The last year the price has swung a lot between profitable and not profitable as the bullrun matured. The market crash in May/June/July proved to be a good buying opportunity to turn a profit on $SOCKS, or to buy for a cheaper pair of physical socks. Even though the enormous returns are a thing of 2019 and 2020, trading $SOCKS still was profitable this past year if timed right, and the project is far from dead.
Volume logically heavily picked up after the boom in price in early 2021. In total the Uniswap liquidity pools have done $138 million in volume, over half of that coming from v1 as the $SOCKS were initially deposited in that pool. $SOCKS is actually one of the last remaining active pools on v1, as most of the other liquidity has fully migrated to the superior v2 & v3 pools. In the past year $SOCKS accounted for 36% of the total volume on v1 ($43m of $118m).
In total 500 $SOCKS tokens were released, so a total of 500 physical pair of socks were ever claimable. As of now 198 pair of socks are claimed, which leaves just over 300 $SOCKS still in liquidity pools or peoples wallets. Because the $SOCKS are in liquidity pools on a bonding curve, the last $SOCKS token cannot be bought even with all ETH tokens in existence. In the 3 liquidity pools only 25 $SOCKS remain to be bought, 19.5 in v1, 5.8 in v3 and 0.45 in v2. The remaining $SOCKS are held in private wallets. There are 157 wallets that hold one or more $SOCKS and could claim a physical pair of socks, but prefer to hold on to their ERC-20 token instead. They hold 257 $SOCKS in total, a vast majority of the total supply, with the top holder having 13 $SOCKS. 2800 wallets hold less than 1 $SOCKS, for a total of 18 $SOCKS.
The graph above shows in which months a pair of socks was claimed. The first few months after launch in May it was not possible to redeem $SOCKS, hence why the first $SOCKS was redeemed in September. The spike in July 2020 is because the Uniswap team made a donation to @BlackGirlsCode and @NAACP [1]. The donation was $10k in ETH, which came from the $SOCKS liquidity pool. The 55 $SOCKS associated with that ETH liquidity were burned.
The last day $SOCKS were exchanged for a physical pair of socks was on July 1st, 2021. This has been the longest stretch ever without a $SOCKS token being redeemed, as evidently very few people would buy a pair of socks for $100k, even in the crypto world. In fact, whenever $SOCKS get redeemed it is the talk of the day as seen by this tweet from Hayden:
If all wallets holding at least 1 $SOCKS redeemed the maximum number of physical socks they could, they would be able to redeem 249 pair of socks. This isn’t far off the total $SOCKS these wallets combined hold (257), because most prefer to hold whole numbers of tokens. Having a fractional token is worth less since you can’t redeem it, hence why for $SOCKS we see a different distribution of fractional holdings compared to other tokens where this matters less. Of the 157 wallets with at least 1 $SOCKS, 93 own $SOCKS as whole numbers, 49 own $SOCKS with a decimal number between 0 and 1, and only 15 hold with a decimal number higher than 1. In fact, 77 wallets hold exactly 1 $SOCKS token!
The highest price when $SOCKS were ever redeemed was $95k, on the 10th of May 2021. This was also when 9 pair of socks were claimed in a single transaction. The value of the socks claimed at the time was a staggering amount of over $850k by 0xb1.
A physical pair of socks isn’t the only thing you receive when redeeming your $SOCKS token, an NFT (ERC-721) is also send to your wallet. There are currently only 144 Unisock NFT’s, as for the donation (and burning) of the 55 $SOCKS in July 2020 no NFT’s were minted. So the NFT’s are at the moment even rarer than $SOCKS!
Unisocks NFT’s recently got relisted on Opensea, so the trading is picking up after a year of close to zero secondary market liquidity, with 3 NFTs sold in March on Opensea. The latest selling between 5 and 18 ETH.
Holding $SOCKS or the Unisocks NFT has another benefit in that you get to join an exclusive telegram group when holding one of the two. What goes on in this Telegram chat? Buy some $SOCKS or an NFT and find out:
All in all, $SOCKS are a super cool idea that kind of got out of hand, and shows a bit of the craziness of the last 3 years in the crypto space. Initially Uniswap planned to burn unsold SOCKS after 100 days, but they decided not to go through with that idea. Uniswap even rewarded users that redeemed or held at least 1 $SOCKS by airdropping 1000 $UNI to those wallets when it released their governance token in September 2020.
These NFT/tokens linked to physical goods or real world actions are a very interesting concept that only furthers helps crypto adaption, of which Unisocks is a pioneer.