Since the beginning of the year, NFTs have been soaring in terms of both price and popularity. The people of space have embezzled a significant amount of capital into original digital images that encapsulate punks, monkeys, rocks, and even plain text.
Looking at how things have panned out, it doesn’t seem like the mania is going to fade anytime soon either.
Bored Monkey Yacht Club [BAYC] is one of those projects that has propelled the industry to new heights with its consistently high transaction volumes. Ranked 5th based on the same parameter on OpenSea, the floor price of this collection had a value of 38 ETH, at press time.
This basically meant that $ 136,800 [approximate value of 38 ETH] was the lowest price the HODLers were willing to sell their monkey collectibles at.
Notably, the project has recorded figures of over $542 million in lifetime sales. Additionally, according to data from Dune Analytics, over 12,121 unique portfolios have owned a monkey at least once.
Capitalizing on enthusiastic participation, the project recently announced that it intends to launch its own token by the first quarter of next year.
Their official announcement feed on Twitter Noted,
“It’s stupid easy to launch an ERC-20 token; it takes minutes. It’s much more complicated to construct a legally compliant token and set it up in a responsible, sustainable way.”
However, they’re also working with a tech-driven legal team called Fenwick West and blockchain-based tech company Horizen Labs to respond quickly to complexities.
With the token launch, BAYC would become one of the first large-scale NFT projects to airdrop tokens to HODLers.
NFT and Native ERC-20 Tokens – What exactly is the problem?
Simply put, ERC-20 is a standard used to create and issue smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. This standard has gradually become a go-to path for projects to create new tokens. Thousands of separate tokens have already been issued in this way and are functioning according to the standard.
To break things further down, ERC-20 smart contracts are primarily used to execute various routines and functions in the digital space. In recent times, they are used more and more by NFT space platforms. Even though it isn’t a must for projects to have their own tokens, they’re usually opted for because of the governance and utility benefits they bring.
This is because these tokens generally tend to go their own way, instead of following Ethereum or the market at large. In fact, the 2017 ICO-fueled bull market was single-handedly dominated by these tokens.
The recent price performance of AGLD further highlighted the not very high correlation shared by these tokens with large cap altcoins.
Worth the hype?
As pointed out by a previous article, the AGLD token was recently airdropped to Loot Project NFT HODLers. Notably, a member of the Loot community built the token, and the other members had to figure out its actual use cases after launch.
Now, even though the idea of developing a BAYC token is in its infant stage, it should be noted that the team has already started building the ecosystem before the launch, unlike Loot. Indeed, the whole process seems to be even more streamlined at the moment.
Given the popularity of BAYC and what it has offered, NFT geeks now need to keep an eye out for the latest developments with respect to the launch.
