Of the thousands of punks I've gazed upon, for some reason this guy is still my favorite, lol.
Hang in there, Clay.
So I was in the Blockhead Games Discord the other day talking to Marky, and he's putting a lot of good work into the project. He's added a history tab so we can see what's been bought and sold in the last 24 hours (upgrade coming soon™). He's added filter functionality to the market so that we can sort punks by lowest price or recently listed Punks. More importantly: he's stated his intentions to commit to this project and keep working on it and adding value.
I've seen quite a few devs getting excited about this project, and other people want to build on top of it. This is the magic of Hive. We actually have a good amount of devs, and the community always comes together to support projects like this. Think of it as a form of consensus. HivePunks is just decentralized enough that we can all build on it and try to pump up the floor value of these NFTs.
I have always been a stanch opponent of NFTs.
@edicted/absolute-nft-insanity
@themarkymark/my-first-nft-for-sale-own-a-piece-of-history-at-my-expense
@edicted/rc-crunch-full-moon-twitter-nft
When we actually go back and look at what I've written about NFTs, the theme is pretty clear. NFTs are very dumb in their current form, but they have a ton of potential, especially in the realm of gaming (in particular MMORPG). Already Hive has projects like Splinterlands and Dcity where NFTs have actual real utility. You must own the NFT to play the game. That's where this is all going long-term.
So why FOMO into a 'dumb' crypto punks clone?
Because seemingly everyone on Hive was on board for it. The @punksonhive wallet was public to all. I saw dozens of familiar accounts supporting this project, all of which have high reputations on Hive. That counts for a lot.
Even now the floor prices for these things is around double the minting price. Anyone who minted punks has basically at least already doubled their money, and that's assuming they got the worst ones possible (highly unlikely).
https://punks.usehive.com/markethistory
Looking at the new market tab we can see that most sales are simply sweeping the floor and buying the "worst" and most basic punks off the market at the cheapest price (35-50) Hive. Every once and a while we'll see one sell for a little more than that.
Volume at this level is great.
Most punks are not priced to sell, with the vast majority sitting on the market for 1000 Hive or more. Truth be told it's quite obvious that most users are not actually looking to sell their punks at this time. We are in the middle of price discovery. Let it ride.
It's a very good sign that the floor is already x2 the minting price. I was sure after they got bought out so quickly that the big buyers would realize they made a mistake and dump their punks on the market lower than cost (especially the lame ones). Clearly, this has not happened and the demand for these things just keeps going up.
But that's all speculative bullshit.
What is far less speculative is that it seems like a dozen devs are already looking to build on this project. There's surprisingly a lot of excitement around this project, and because these NFTs live on HiveEngine they are just decentralized enough to build out new frontends.
What kind of frontends?
At this point I'm thinking about going back to an old project that I never finished: PentaSkill. I was planning on implementing NFTs on this project, but why do that when I can just plug it in to HivePunks and tap in to a built-in community? You'd need to own a HivePunk to play the game, just like you need Splinterlands NFTs to play Splinterlands. It's really not that hard to give NFTs fundamental value, it's just a matter of actually doing it.
Hive is different.
In cases like this we can very much leverage our feeless infrastructure to great effect. This is a very big deal. No more bullshit $200 charges on Ethereum for a failed transaction. Everything is free and frictionless. Devs can build on Hivepunks without having to worry about all the scaling issues that chains with fees have. The lack of friction in this market is about to play a huge roll in our ability to scale up and build out.
For example, You'd never EVER EVER be able to play a rock/paper/scissors style game on Ethereum. One game would cost you like over $1000. Give me a break. Meanwhile, Hive is one of the few platforms that allows users to yield farm bandwidth. As long as we have enough Hive to transact (this number is bound to go up eventually) everything will be fine.
At the moment a single account probably doesn't even need more than 10 Hive powered up to do whatever they want here. However, what happens when Hive implements RC pools and this number gets jacked up to around 100 Hive? Still not that big of a deal, but what if 1 Hive was worth $100? See where this is going? Once Hive scales up it might cost $10000 just for the privilege of having free transactions. Every network will reach its scaling limit eventually, and Hive is no exception. We are so early in the game it's not even funny. Most people can not see where this is going, and even my predictions are likely only 50% accurate at best.
Moving on
The hype surrounding the project is approaching legendary levels. I went into Discord to congratulate Marky on his success and he wanted to know what I was there to complain about. I have always given Marky shit, so a recommendation from me is pretty high praise in this context, especially considering how much trash I've talked about NFTs in the past.
Conclusion
This project is going places. My only regret is that I didn't mint more of them. I actually would have liked to own 1% of the supply (100 Punks) but I currently only have 72 and I only minted like 43. The ones that I've bought off the market have been x2 to x4 the minting price (40-80 Hive), and I even bought Landry Flint from @lordbutterfly under the table for 150 Hive. I'm a man possessed.
At the same time whenever I buy, where is that money going? It's going to the people of this community. This is a primary example of how communities can circulate value within the bounds of their own networks without bleeding out to exchange pair dumps. I realize now that this is a big reason people like NFTs. It's an easy way to support people in the community and keep the money within the given crypto country.
Conclusion conclusion
Very exciting times. By all accounts Hive should be trading at like 70 cents or less during a crash like this, but we are currently still rocking that $1 mark. At this point I fully expect to be trading over $10 per Hive within the next 12 months (guaranteed). We've simply been building too hard and scraping the bottom for too long for any other outcome. We earned this.
Marky is committed to this project and says he's shifting gears to NFTs and gaming full time. That's great because I'm also aligned in the same positioning. The more devs we can get onboard to create games on Hive, the better. Play to Earn is the future of gaming.