As the dust starts to settle for PFPs, I took some time to look into what the fundamental drivers of value might be for some of our favorite collections and how they stack up against each other.

Although not exhaustive by any means, I took a look at some of the most critical infrastructure some teams are building out behind the scenes.

Although floors are important, I think benchmarking beyond the floor is worth exploring as we see these projects look to “go beyond the drop” and create sustainable businesses with their PFP communities at the very core of it. 

My personal view is that I still think we’re still in day 1 of NFTs. Not a single project has launched a business model that doesn’t rely on minting additional tokens or secondary trading royalties. Creating a sustainable business model is going to be especially important but also challenging as we enter this crypto/NFT winter. It’s also important to note that a project should operate under the assumption as if secondary royalties are 0% as marketplaces like Blur gain traction. 

It’s also ok if an NFT project doesn’t have a business model per se. A lot of these were projects were started in the mania of what was otherwise a cambrian explosion of projects who had no intention of creating a venture backable business. As long as teams can keep the lights on, pay their employees and continue to deliver value (whatever that means) to their community, they don’t necessarily NEED to be the winner who takes all. Some of these were started as passion projects that quite simply got lucky and are still here to this day. 

I don’t really have a revolutionary takeaway here other than that some of these metrics might be a bit more important than others. For instance, a marketplace for wearables might make a lot more sense for RTFKT / CloneX than it does for say, Moonbirds. RTFKT are selling metaverse ready wearables which will be equipable to their already 3D avatars, whereas Moonbirds might be OK operating without one and instead have some other utility (hard to say bc the project is so new).

To take it a step further, Jadu has a grants program specifically targeted towards artists who want to build at the intersections of their IP. Jadu has launched (like RTFKT) with metaverse ready 3D ready avatars so in order for Jadu’s creator ecosystem to reach some fraction of the scale of RTFKT (see below) a grants program makes sense to fund projects that will capture more mind share.

Compare this to the different strategy of how Pudgy Penguins are tapping their community for licensing deals with their toys.

Now for the fun chart. I think another metric to look at in terms of adoption are the diversity of social media followers. By this metric alone, RTFKT is blowing everyone out of the water. 1 million followers on TikTok just doesn’t compare to anyone else and obviously Nike took note. 

In order to reach beyond the ~5,550 unique holders the average NFT project has, social media composition will be crucial as it relates to adoption outside of CT. Obviously BAYC & RTFKT are leading the pack in their respective verticals but with challenge comes opportunities. For instance, Azuki have doubled down on the Asian / Anime markets with the look of their PFPs, the artistic direction of BEANZ and the addition of Rehito Hatoyama as an advisor to Chiru Labs.

The verticalization of PFPs will continue to develop in order for these projects to own (or define) subsets of their target markets.

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In conclusion, it’s still way early days for these NFT projects. Yuga and team are building out the Otherside with gaming as their Northstar, RTFKT continues to push the digital fashion meta along (in parallel with Nike) and Pudgy Penguins are leaning into toys and merchandising as their North Star. As for the rest of the projects (based on publicly available information) it’s difficult to tell the direction of the business model at hand (if there even is one).