NFTs were and still are a talk in every corner of cryptoverse. It’s something (usually a jpeg) that everybody loves to own. This newfound interest was somewhat distant to the normies as there are time when the gas price on Ethereum mainnet skyrockets during popular NFT mints. Now, Optimism as a layer 2 solved that gas issue (Unfortunately not the European gas issue :( ) and platforms like Quix seems to have picked up the NFT game on Optimism.

With different projects having different themes, different utilities and different cults, we’d be looking at what different projects are more similar based on their buyers. We are only considering the sales happened on Quix on Optimism, and for this particular analysis we are not looking at how these users interacted with each other (certainly a nice idea to look at in the future) but just how they bought different NFT projects. We’ll be using Optimism data by FlipsideCrypto which are still in light mode.

The projects with the same colour means that they are pretty similar in terms of the users who bought them. (for example buyers more often buy NFTs from projects which are in a same colour). The colour being applied based on the modularity class of the graph structure with Louvain method.

The famous punk or here in this case the Optipunks have been the project to earn most in sales, however Mirror wnft optimism collective: hello world has the highest number of buyers which may suggest that Punks were pricy but still people seems to have bought them. if we look at this Optipunk cult further we can see that 8 projects are linked together with the buyers. Specially that foreign language project (交互) has one buyer and they have bought genesiskami project. In this cluster Optipunks are pretty dominant.

Looking at this beautiful clusters it make sense to see what are the cult (clusters) forming in this platform.

Well, there are 69 different cults while most of the cults have very few projects we can see a bunch of cults with over 10 projects. Cult ID 41 has the highest number of buyers while it has only 8 projects this cult can be called as the mirror cult as mirror wnft optimism collective: hello world and words viamirror are part of that group. These buyers could be more like newbies or people who try out things anticipating airdrops etc? As the group is bigger less number of projects tried out so not degen type, and looks like some basic protocol specific NFTs, so either these are new people getting their hands dirty or people interacting with Optimism for future airdrops?

Interestingly veNFT, which are Velodrome locked tokens, are part of this mirror cult. So, the Velodrome racers who had listed their NFTs on Quix seems to have more align with mirror and Optidudes buyers than the rest.

Cult 67 is the one with most projects, although the number of buyers are relatively low ~2K it had 26 projects which means that many of the buyers of this cult are degens, they ape in to multiple projects. Optinouns is the centre or the most popular project of this cult.

After degen cult the other biggest cult is Cult ID 68, who seems to be predominately in to DAOs Unsiwap and Supernerds, we’ll call them the nerd cult. It’s pretty obvious that these kind of cults are mostly formed based on their interests in using different protocols/dapps, may not be merely aping to jpegs, these kind of buyers certainly look for utility than the aesthetics.

To conclude, we can see that different people flock together while purchasing NFTs from different projects. These can be projects with similar values, similar teams or probably similar demographies. However, there can be people who ape in to everything which creates cults like this above degen cult where smaller number of people purchasing in to relatively higher number of projects. The Nerd cult shows that type of buyers who’d look for utility rather than aesthetic, however it was pretty interesting that veNFT from Veledrome was not a part of that cult but the mirror cult which looks more like a cult of newbies. Anyway this space is beautiful and tons of things to look at. Would love to looking to more cults and also the interaction between the buyers.

finally, I tried adding a temporal dimension to the formation of cults, just enjoy…

• ShroomDK from FlipSideCrypto was used to query the data from optimism.core.ez_nft_sales table.