What changes will come to the NFT circle when BAYC issues tokens?

Recently, the news of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) coin offering has been a heavy headline in the industry. The constantly pushing ace project has once again received unanimous attention from the crypto community for a while.

On March 17, BAYC announced the official launch of its native token, ApeCoin, with 15% of the total supply airdropped to BAYC/MAYC NFT holders. The BAYC team said that ApeCoin will be available to all and is expected to start going live on major mainstream crypto exchanges as soon as possible. In the meantime, influential exchanges rush to go live at the first opportunity.

As an old and evergreen project in the NFT field, BAYC's coin offering has gained the favor of some capital enterprises and suffered the criticism of some investors obsessed with the artistry of NFT. BAYC's coin offering also brings us more thoughts. Although there are many tracks in the NFT field, will they all be grouped into the exact roadmap in the future, and will they all go to the ultimate road of meta-universe?

If we talk about the origin of NFT development, time can be traced back to 2014. At that time, the meme sad frog NFT application released by Counterparty opened up people's imagination to the concept of NFT for the first time. Later, with the rise of Ethereum, some NFT concept projects also began to grow on it, which attracted some enterprises and capital to enter NFT continuously. Finally, the "everything can be NFT" era also opened the curtain.

With the further development of the Defi economy, the total market value of the crypto industry also began to soar, once reaching $3 trillion, and the market value of NFT was over $15 billion, accounting for about 1% of the digital asset market. The avatar category NFTs account for the largest share of the market, with a market cap of $8 billion. Games, art, and collectibles NFTs followed, with a market cap between $2.3 and $3.3 billion.

Since last year, along with the explosion of AxieInfinity, the NFT ecology has given rise to GameFi's new Play To Earn economic model and also, more than that, a series of tracks such as SocialFi and NFT Swap. In addition, after the digital asset market was immersed in a bear market, more investors began to turn to the NFT sector to find potential value investments in it.

An NFT avatar is usually an image of a character used as a digital profile picture. The vast majority of NFT avatars are unique and have varying degrees of scarcity. As the market demands, many pairs of NFT avatar projects have been given many other features to add more application scenarios to NFT.

Although avatar-based NFTs account for the largest share in the NFT space, their market is still relatively niche. For example, it is known that many projects have a distribution of 10,000, but only 2,000 to 4,000 unique owners. But despite this, the market for the NFT avatar category is still expanding in demand.

On March 12, Yuga Labs, the parent company of BAYC, announced that it had acquired the IP of the CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections from Larva Labs and will soon grant CryptoPunks and Meebits holders the same commercial rights as BAYC and MAYC holders. Upon this news, the Meebits floor price spiked 60% at one point to 6.5 ETH. CryptoPunks saw a significant increase in trading volume, and the floor price started to rise, rising 11.3% to 74.79 ETH.

CryptoPunks, as a milestone in the NFT industry, has been considered the "Bitcoin" of the NFT space. Therefore, some people in the community also jokingly said that this is the "Ether" of NFT acquiring "Bitcoin," and gave a "Litecoin." for free. But at this stage of the market environment, as a variety of NFT ecology and GameFi rise up, the development of avatar NFT class is not as hot as before, and seems to have entered an era of "after the avatar class NFT."

Review the reason for the popularity of avatar NFT, which is driven by the celebrity effect of the craze, and did not enter the general public's vision. The blue ocean value behind it has not been discovered, and the social media rights have made it more like a game for the rich. Ordinary people can not participate and are not interested in participating. So it is imperative that the avatar class NFT "to aristocratic" has been urgent, but also the trend is forced.

Among the many tracks in the NFT field, the game NFT category is the fastest-growing part of the NFT market. Since May last year, the Play To Earn game craze has continued to fuel the development of the GameFi, and GameFi has also ushered in the market's enthusiastic pursuit, which has also set off the public's high fever for the meta-universe, making the meta-universe successfully out of the circle.

No coincidence, there are still many doubts about the NFT game track. So far, players of games in the NFT game market are usually the most significant funding source. Most chain games ask players to buy in-game items, and developers typically charge a small fee for each transaction.

Tim Morten, the co-founder of Frost Giant Studio, has said that this model is close to a "pyramid scheme" in danger. Blockchain games using this model are healthy as they grow in popularity but run into trouble when they reach their peak. Declining interest in the game means that the valuation of the game's tokens decreases, which leads to a decline in player revenue, which further reduces the game's popularity. It's a vicious cycle. As far as the future development of the chain game is concerned, it still has a lot of potential, but if we go for the NFT ecology of the game, then it is bound to be eliminated.

Based on the development of AI, the Play-to-earn model began to shift to the Create-to-earn model gradually. The Create-to-earn model, which brings new services to players through virtual creations, is mainly achieved by creators providing value-added services. By being able to create virtually, creators gain real-world revenue. With economic incentives, users are inspired to create, and this player creation-led approach brings immersive experiences and social scenarios, which are the essential building blocks for building metaverse.

In Web 3.0, we reorganize the world into crypto networks where the global Internet community can now own digital assets and form new asset classes in the emerging marketplace of user-owned and controlled encrypted cloud economies. And NFT social is formally the key to building its base low. Imagine if NFT's GameFi then added its social empowerment so that different GameFis all acknowledge the entry of the same type of community NFT and achieve interoperability between various ecologies. This forms the most basic prototype of the meta-universe.

The BAYC coin offering has drawn intense attention from the market. Still, it has also led to some thoughts on whether NFT, which is only limited to artistic and interchangeable hands, can only turn the situation around by developing an ecology and whether the essence of NFT should be to tell a good story or to go with the flow and cater to public tastes.

First, where is the motivation for BAYC's coin offering?

BAYC is a universe focused on creating a universe and exclusive club behind NFT. With games such as Mutant Arcade, charity events, and club benefits, BAYC has maintained that hype and relatively high floor price. While the formula for success used by BAYC is familiar, it still keeps trying to push the existing boundaries of NFT. But the reason for its coin offering is still to be found in the strategic placement of its parent company.

BAYC's parent company, Yuga Labs, is very good at operating and developing PFP-type projects and community ecology. The acquisition of star NFT IPs such as CryptoPunks and Meebits is just a microcosm of Yuga Labs' business operation capabilities. As the PFP NFT play is gradually known to the public, Yuga Labs also began its more ambitious plans.

In Yuga Labs' March 12 joint announcement, Yuga stated that it is building a game-centric meta-universe called "MetaRPG," with BAYC as the center of the universe. Yuga plans to expand the world of BAYC and invite people other than the ape avatars to join. ApeCoin will be the currency of the economic system of this ape meta-universe.

The news of BAYC's coin offering has also gained the attention of prominent figures in the circle. In his Time magazine article, V God criticized BAYC as an act of gambling. But, on the other hand, he hoped that Ether would become a launching pad for various socio-political experiments that could check and balance the authoritarian government and subvert the stranglehold of Silicon Valley on digital life.

If we don't make our voices heard, the only things that will build up are those that are immediately profitable," V-God said. So one of the decisions I made in 2022 ways to be more adventurous and less neutral. I'd rather Ether offend some people than become meaningless."

Of course, it's not just V-God. Many investors in the circle say they are not optimistic, believing that its coin offering goes against the original purpose of NFT and that a good NFT should be more about figuring out how to build its storytelling and deepen the underlying value stack. The meta-universe concept has not yet taken shape, and issuing coins is premature and will only consume its value in advance.

But in fact, we can leave it to time to determine whether BAYC's coin offering is meaningless or whether it is a premature depletion of its value, and what we can see at this stage is that BAYC's coin offering has successfully attracted some capital, which will help its future development.

Compared to Defi, the entrepreneurs of NFT are some newbies who may not have a technical background or a lot of knowledge reserve. However, it has become a top-down development. Its large number of out-of-the-loop has successfully guided many people who have no blockchain concept or even no crypto-asset background to enter the circle. And at this stage, the development of NFT has also started to become diversified. It has become a trend for some NFT projects with single value empowerment to be eliminated.

With the coin offering of BAYC, I believe that the NFT market has started to move and is planning strategies toward more diversification and possibilities. It's too early to judge which project has potential because, from experience, all NFT projects that became a hit were not well received by the public at the beginning of the offering. And something we thought was "worthless" may have started to become a trend in the market.

Please note that a new wave of NFT coin offerings is coming.