Written by @Tutucrypto ，@viviDabest888 and @Momoxu7

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@glow_dao

In Jan 2022, OpenSea’s monthly volume topped $5B as NFTs continue to heat up while major coins have been in a seasonal bear market. During the Lunar New Year, we participated in the launch of Zipcy’s SuperNormal, one of the most successful NFT PFPs on OpenSea. We would like to share some insights on the thought process of investing and collaborating with Super Normal in the first place.

Unique Art & Design

I first saw Zipcy’s Super Normal collection in late November and was immediately attracted to the strong and unique styles as a PFP project. I think it is a super “abnormal” project compared to other mainstream PFPs.

Back in November there were only a few PFPs with oriental elements such as 0N1Force; “Crypto native aesthetics” namely Crypto Punks & BAYC dominated the market. However, we believe that a large number of new players with different backgrounds are breaking into the NFT market. As the gateway, the preferences on PFPs should be more diverse in terms of gender, culture and age. We believe that Zipcy’s Super Normal may perfectly fill the market gap.

Furthermore, we rarely see female artists or female-led projects in the crypto art community. On the back of “World of Women”, “Dead Fellaz”, as well as other female-led PFP projects, we have strong conviction in Zipcy’s Super Normal.

 Strong & Professional Team

In terms of investment decisions, it is always your top priority to learn about the team. Our research team has done a comprehensive and in-depth due diligence on the project team. Here are some highlights:

- Zipcy:  A well-established illustrator based in South Korea with around 690K followers on Instagram. She has a solid background and track record based on her previous works and illustrations. Here’s a video interview of her on YouTube, where you can see the genuine artist for who she is. （之前那句话很有侵略性，这样说好一些）

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_yn7DBqcQU)

- Andrew Choi: is the brain of the project. He is a super talented engineer based in the US with stacked experiences from major tech firms, e.g., Microsoft, Coinbase etc. Andrew, as the operations partner, is also active on Instagram, twitter and YouTube. (https://www.youtube.com/c/%EC%B5%9C%EC%9C%A0%EC%A7%84EugeneChoi/videos)

- Joe: is always active on discord and twitter spaces promoting their work. The project team consists of well mixed, international elites. Their announcement channels are in 3 different languages welcoming communities speaking Korean, Japanese and Chinese.

- Gimpey, Palis and Tron: although are anonymous, they all have previous work experiences on crypto projects and have been active on discord.

Overall, the core team members are reputable public figures dedicated to see the project succeed, while the developers are of competent backgrounds to support their vision. 

Smart Marketing Strategies

Unique art, strong team and smart marketing strategies are equally important in making a top notch PFP project. Early on when we decided to collaborate with Super Normal, there were only around 30K organic community members in their discord, mostly Korean and English speakers who joined in since November.

Their whitelisting process was neat and fair. In the beginning, there were two ways to get whitelisted: bounty submissions and 20 invitations, and those spots were filled easily. Then a WL lottery system was put in place to encourage member activities and cohesion.

As the mint date approached, the project team began to ramp up their marketing. For example, frequent twitter promotions including a variety of WL collaborations with crypto KOLs and popular NFT projects. A few days before mint, they put on the finishing touch: “an invitation contest to gain free mints” which saw their discord go parabolic to the north of 100k. Due to clever marketing, they boosted their community from 30k to 100k in under 3 weeks.

Super Normal also used a smart minting strategy. There were three phases: Free Mint, Pre-Sale and Public Sale. Given the high popularity and strong sentiment in the community, the team decided to do a Dutch auction starting from 2 ETH in the Pubic Mint, which effectively set the starting price upon Opensea listing, eventually the floor price reached 6E at its peak.

 Timing

As I have emphasized before, the success of a project is also closely related to timing: the right timing to follow the industry trend. Based on the rally of Clone X, Azuki, Killer GF, and other popular projects, we can project the future of NFTs to be diversified meeting the demands of females, Asian players and blockchain gamers. That is also one of the key factors making Zipcy’s Super Normal so successful.

 Statistics

We have looked into Nansen data of SuperNormal. We have seen that top balance NFT holders and smart money are still buying SuperNormal, indicating their strong confidence in the long future of this project. Besides, diamond hands have only sold 5% of their NFT assets, indicating relatively low selling power in the market.