Welcome to the first edition of NFT Future Friday, where we’ll take a look at some awesome projects with upcoming releases in the near future, including all the links necessary to learn everything you need to know before making a decision to mint or purchase. Today I’ll start by diving deeper into three primary projects, while listing some honorable mentions that you can do your own research on after reading.
Please note: I spent quite some time going through upcoming projects that mint in the next week (since I was hoping to find these for the "Future Fridays" post), but I was unable to find projects that I was particularly interested in. It seems that this upcoming week might be a bit slow in NFT-land as there's lots of shit but few quality projects releasing this week, so I'm going to cover some recent/upcoming projects that might be a bit more on the expensive side. I just hope this will serve as a showcase of what "good" NFT projects look like, both in terms of art quality and community!
Let's dive in.
Project #1: Habibi
Habibi is a very interesting project that came across my desk a few weeks ago while lounging about the Stellar channel in the Missing Frontier Discord server. Many of the NFT pros had been mentioning this great artist "Mark the Habibi" and repping his work, so I took a look at his Opensea profile and was amazed by what I saw:
Few profile picture projects (PFPs) are as unique, colorful, and distinctive as Habibi's collection. What you see above are animated 1/1's previously released, although today (technically yesterday since this newsletter is late) was the first day where his art was released to the public. Last night, 1000 mint passes for his first collection of 1000 Habibi's was released in a Dutch auction (starting at 2 ETH and slowly lowering the price until it is sold out) where over 600/1000 were bought at a price of 0.5 ETH within about 90 seconds. Those lucky enough to obtain a mint pass will have their Habibi's revealed next week on 27 October. However, if you're looking to get a Habibi you don't need to wait until next week, you can head to his Opensea profile and purchase a public mint pass (approximately 0.6 ETH at the time of this posting).
Project #2: Arcus by Rik Oostenbroek
Twitter | Opensea | SuperRare | Website | Discord
Showing some love to our fellow Dutch artists, Rik Oostenbroek is a visual artist from Hilversum with over a decade of experience working with enormous brands such as Apple, Mercedes, Red Bull, and more. Arcus represents the first major series this artist has released as NFTs, although he has been working on this series for over 5 years.
Motion and color collide in fluid, dynamic infinite topologies that one might expect to see in an advanced geometry textbook, where smooth shapes flow like storm clouds into and over itself in a stunning display of static motion. These pieces of art represent phases of the artist's journey throughout his career, and his website contains detailed descriptions describing the state of mind he was in when these pieces were originally conceived.
Make note: these are absolutely collector's items, and are not meant for a quick flip. Starting the sales at 1.5 ETH, these may have a higher barrier to entry than most, but considering that his direct sales have resulted in a floor of over 16 ETH on OpenSea, those looking for long-term investment in AAA-quality digital art need look no further than Nederland's own Rik Oostenbroek.
This series is being released slowly as direct raffles available to customers who sign up on his website. For more information on how to acquire an Arcus, visit his website listed above or hop into his Discord to ask more questions. In order to obtain one of these unique NFTs, you're going to need to be patient and stay on top of his Twitter feed in order to sign up for the next drop.
Project 3: NeoNexus on Solana
Twitter | Golden Tickets | Residential Properties | Website | Discord
In order to counter-balance the first two projects, which are admittedly on the more expensive side (though for obvious reasons) I am going to cover an upcoming project on Solana that has a very low barrier to entry, NeoNexus.
NeoNexus is a recently released NFT "social game" project on the Solana blockchain that is building a "neon cyberpunk" dystopian universe where gangs roam the streets and warlords do back-room dealings with corrupt politicians and corporate overlords, extracting wealth and developing the "Mind Augmentation Device," a metaverse-inspired technology that the citizens have been using as entertainment and distraction while the real masters continue about their nefarious business. The team is highly active in their already-active Discord server, where the community is busy role-playing and crafting their own unique characters inside the NeoNexus universe.
So what gives? Why is this a good investment?
Purchasing a golden ticket (particularly those numbered #1-5000, see link above) grants you lifetime access to upcoming NFT mints, free airdrops (I've already received 2 free airdrops), access to REAL-LIFE events that the community puts together, and much more.
November has a lot of upcoming events for NeoNexus, so securing a Golden Ticket allows you to get first in line (and guaranteed mints) of upcoming properties, characters, and items in the NeoNexus universe. NeoNexus is currently one of the most popular non-profile picture Solana NFT projects, and is poised to become a "blue chip" NFT project on the Solana platform.
Don't forget, even if you decide to sell your minted NFTs you can still hang on to your golden ticket and either sell it for another person to enter the ecosystem, or you can hang on to it just in case you want to re-enter and participate in future drops and releases.
Honorable Mentions:
- Doodles (Website) are a very unique (yet strikingly familiar) NFT profile picture project from well-known artist Burnt Toast. Recently he dropped his Doodles PFP project (10,000 items) that are pastel-colored and incredibly unique when compared to other PFP projects. These definitely have a long-term future due to their uniqueness and cuteness factor alone, and the floor is currently at about 1.35 ETH.
- Alpacadabras (Website) are a brand new project that is about to finish minting (sorry, white list only, I am not on the white list either) that have a relatively low floor of about 0.25 ETH. A collection of 9669 Alpacas with super-alpaca abilities, this pixelated art project has a full rarity table and a discord server of over 50k members, so if you're looking for an active community with a cheap floor for entry, this might be your best bet in the short term!
- BearX is an upcoming pixelated bear PFP project. I cannot recommend anything more than attempting to get on the whitelist for the upcoming launch. There is not a website (yet) and the art can be found on the Discord server linked above. Some examples of the art can be seen below:
Since this project is so early, it’s difficult to determine if this is a long-term worthy project. But if you can get on the white list, you can probably do a quick flip because the Discord is so large. Good luck!
My apologies for the late post, but hopefully this was a decent insight into the few quality projects that released recently, as well as a few suggestions for current/upcoming projects that might be worth investigating! If you have any questions, you can always shoot me a message on Twitter or Discord (Zomboy#2590).
See you next time!