2024 NFT Annual Awards: From leading the Meme trend to completing the “last dance” by issuing coins

Author: Wenser, Odaily Planet Daily

At the end of the year, the encryption industry also ushered in its own "year-end summary moment." Compared with the hot sectors such as AI, Meme, and Desci, NFT is undoubtedly a little lonely. If it weren’t for the launch of the Fat Penguin PENGU token at the end of the year, many people might have questions like “Did the NFT bull market really exist?”

Looking back at the whole year of 2024, it can be called a "misfortune" for the NFT track. Despite this, it still undoubtedly has a place in the encryption market, and has even become a trend-setting and consistent presence. In conjunction with this article, Odaily Planet Daily will review with readers a series of representative events on the NFT track in 2024, allowing us to recall the year of "love and hate" for NFT.

The first half of 2024: A dream start and the “King of Meme”

Back to the beginning of 2024, I believe it can be called a “dream start” for many NFT players.

After experiencing a series of NFT hype in the BTC ecosystem, market sentiment once recovered. The price of BTC NFTs such as Node Monkey and Puppet Monkey once reached as high as 0.5 BTC. Now that the BTC price has exceeded a new high of $108,000, it is still amazing. . To put it bluntly, for many BTC Inscription players, NFT players, and later Rune players, rushing left and right, with constant FOMO, the outcome is most likely "the harder you work, the more money you lose", which is not as good as holding coins. Not moving.

But in any case, under the stimulation of good news such as the upcoming approval of the BTC spot ETF, "2024, the year of the NFT track" has finally begun. The first to step on this stage is the Ethereum ecological NFT project-Tinfun.

January Tianfang: The “IP Dream” of top KOLs in the Chinese NFT circle

As the top KOL in the Chinese NFT circle, the launch of Tinfun undoubtedly embodies a lot of efforts of Laser Cat. In addition, the Alpha community behind it, the oriental ink painting style of Tinfun NFT and the narrative of the martial arts world are also many reasons why Tinfun has attracted much attention.

After the great success of Azuki, countless players in the Chinese NFT circle hope to have an NFT project that can truly represent "Oriental aesthetics" to stand out, gather a group of fans of their own in the crypto world, and prove to the world: "Hua Liu is the The coolest one!" Judging from the NFT sample diagram revealed by the project, Tinfun undoubtedly has such a possibility, so many people have high hopes for it. Not only that, Tinfun’s mini-games were also welcomed by the community at that time. As the end of the year approached the Spring Festival, the atmosphere of entertainment games was also relatively strong; in addition, Tinfun also made micro-innovations in the NFT Mint process - creating the " The "Money Mint" gameplay eliminates the trouble of wasting a lot of Gas when NFT players rush to mint it.

In view of the positive stimulation for various reasons, on the day of the public sale on January 7, the deposits received by the TinFun project exceeded 10,000 ETH, equivalent to approximately US$22.8 million, in less than 24 hours; and on January 8, the The amount of participation in the sale reached the expected target of 25,000 ETH, and the final public sale ended early. Due to the large amount of participation, many overseas bloggers at the time suspected that Laser Kitty would "run away". After all, in a dark forest with no trust at all in the cryptosphere, human nature is often difficult to withstand the test.

But Laser Cat and the team behind it are obviously not this type of people. Even Laser Cat himself said bluntly: "I may fail, but I will never run away."

Tinfun’s subsequent airdrops and secondary transactions also triggered FOMO in the market, and the floor price once exceeded 0.8 ETH; however, after the release of the image, the art details and homogeneity issues of Tinfun NFT were inevitably questioned by the market, and Tinfun’s follow-up plan "IP development route", in the end, it is difficult to escape the fate of "falling floor price spiral" of NFT projects.

According to data from the NFTGo website, the current floor price of Tinfun NFT is about 0.11 ETH, but the average transaction price is about 0.5 ETH, and the number of holding addresses has gradually decreased to about 1,400 now.

Tinfun floor price related information, source: NFTGo

It is worth mentioning that due to the expected impact of the third phase of Blur activities and the Blast airdrop, Tinfun passed a community vote in early March and unanimously decided to migrate the project to the Blast chain. Subsequently, some Tinfun holders also experienced various Blast A certain amount of Blast ecological gold points and other rewards can be obtained for projects or activities, but as far as NFT returns are concerned, it can only be said to be better than nothing.

Looking at it now, to a certain extent, the Tinfun project illustrates one thing: NFT projects still cannot escape the "liquidity cycle" and avoid the downward spiral of token/NFT prices in cryptocurrency market projects, especially in the area of ​​IP. This development route is undoubtedly more difficult.

FebruaryNobody: NFT community blessed by "Stephen Chow Halo"

If Tinfun has given NFT a good start in 2024, then Stephen Chow's NFT project Nobody is more like another "star NFT project" that "takes advantage of the momentum".

The project lasted more than half a year. The name of the project was originally Moonbox because it was inspired by the Moonlight Box in Stephen Chow's famous movie "Westward Journey". Later, in order to enhance the community attributes, it was changed to Nobody. Some community members even wrote songs and paintings under the name Nobody. painting, launching a series of second creations. After Tinfun successfully launched its "Money Stream Mint", Nobody also followed suit and also used this method to sell NFT and successfully completed the sale.

Not only that, after the sale, the floor price of Nobody increased rapidly by about 5 times. On February 5, the floor price once exceeded 0.9 ETH, and the trading volume reached 2,500 ETH, triggering countless people to enter the market with FOMO and continuous buying. It has to be said that at that time, many NFT players were not deeply involved in the project due to the stereotypes such as "star NFT projects are all scams, scams, and money-making". The violent pull of wave is also unpredictable.

Of course, if you don't eat the "meat" of this wave of rising prices, you will naturally avoid the "beating" that you will get in the subsequent wave of floor price drops.

Although Stephen Chow later went to the Nobody community Discord to interact with NFT holders, and even opened an .eth) also bought Nobody #889 NFT at a price of 19.52 WETH to directly express support, but Nobody followed up like most NFTs. The same project, after experiencing "opening doubts", the price dropped all the way, and finally in mid-March, NFT fell below the offering price of 0.19527 ETH, and then gradually fell into silence.

According to the NFTGo website data, the current floor price of Nobody is about 0.054 ETH, and the number of held addresses is about 3,000. As for Stephen Chow's X platform account, the last update was an announcement about the 9527 Theater short play on June 1 this year.

Information related to Nobody NFT floor price, source: NFTGo

Since then, there has been another "celebrity NFT failure case". Stephen Chow, the king of comedy and a generation of actor, has not been able to break this curse.

March BOME: A Meme Coin Carnival Triggered by NFT Artists

As time enters March, there is not much to say about specific NFT projects, but as the theme song of "Ultraman Tega" sings: "A new storm has emerged, how can we stand still?"

Just as the market is immersed in the joy of BTC prices breaking new highs, a Meme coin craze triggered by NFT artists is already quietly brewing.

Crypto artist Darkfarms 1 took the lead in firing the "first shot of NFT artist currency issuance in 2024". Perhaps someone has done this before him, but it has never reached the height of the project he released, because, the name of this Meme coin Called - BOME (Book Of MEME). After raising 10,000 SOL, Darkfarms 1 also withstood the test of human nature. Instead of absconding with the money, it pioneered the use of a large amount of funds to join the token liquidity pool, thus setting off a "3-day rapid "Binance" Meme coin miracle.

On March 14, shortly after BOME was launched, its market value quickly exceeded US$50 million; 9 hours after it went online, its market value exceeded US$100 million, and its price exceeded US$0.0015, an increase of more than 30 times from the issue price;

On March 15, the price of BOME exceeded US$0.0025, continuing to hit a new high; then, its price soared like a rocket. Around 12 o'clock that night on the 15th, the price of BOME successfully exceeded US$0.01, and its market value increased to nearly US$700 million. .

Affected by the soaring price of BOME, the floor price of the NFT series SMOWL previously launched by Darkfarms once exceeded 0.4 ETH, with a single-day increase of 71.14% and a 7-day increase of 713.66%. In addition, on the day BOME was launched, the number of active addresses on the Solana network reached a peak of nearly a month (119 10,000), the number of active addresses increased by a maximum of 115.66% from 02.14 to 03.14. ; Affected by the BOME craze, the number of newly issued Memes on the Solana network surged from March 14 to 16. The number of new SPL tokens on March 14 was 8,849, which is expected to exceed the peak in the past month (9,690) this week. ).

Not only that, BOME also pioneered a new asset issuance method of "donation-based currency issuance", which triggered countless imitators. For example, the Meme project COCO (Little Crocodile) launched by NFT artist and crypto KOL Kero (@KeroNFTs) has received more than 42,000 SOLs 2 hours after launching the fundraiser, worth more than 7.5 million US dollars, and the market went crazy for a while. In addition, Mfers founders Satoshi, Doodles Lianchuang and others were not to be outdone. Meme coins issued by NFT artists such as MFERSCOIN were also active in the Solana, ETH, and Base ecosystems.

Of course, this currency issuance path has also brought more scams and chaos to the market, including the crypto KOL VT who subsequently defrauded more than 20,000 BNB, the crypto veteran Huang Licheng (Maji) who subsequently defrauded more than 190,000 SOL, and raised nearly 160,000 The Dexters behind SOL's GM.ai are all actual beneficiaries of this process.

But all this cannot skip the crucial step, which is - Binance lists BOME.

At noon on March 16, according to the official announcement, Binance will launch the BOME 1-50 times U-based perpetual contract at 20:30 on March 16, 2024 (Eastern Eighth District time).

As soon as the news came out, market sentiment began to turn from crazy to crazy.

After all, for many crypto projects that have gone through several rounds of VC investment and community financing, it is not easy for their tokens to be queued up and listed on Binance. Now, the Meme coin released by an NFT artist has been launched in just a short time. In 3 days, we completed the "Binance launch journey" that many projects would not complete in 3 years. This makes people feel frustrated that "doing a serious project is not as good as issuing a Meme coin." In addition, Solana’s ecological one-click coin issuance platform pump.fun also began to emerge. Since then, the “Meme coin boom” that has laid the main theme of this year and even this cycle has begun.

Although Binance later seized the opportunity to list a batch of "VC coins" when market sentiment was high and liquidity was good, many project tokens with "high FDV and low circulation" did not only absorb liquidity unilaterally from the market. , compared with Meme coins, which have a lower threshold for understanding, a wider mass base, and lower purchase costs, it is difficult not to abandon them like crap.

After all, in the eyes of many people, the countless VC coins that seem to be used for serious projects are not even as good as "meme coins that make people smile and provide people with emotional value" from the perspective of usefulness.

From another comparative perspective, Meme coins are also Fungible Tokens (homogeneous tokens) of NFTs. Regarding this point of view, we discussed this in the article "Meme coins: A complete substitute for NFTs" in May this year. Detailed elaboration, welcome to review.

Regarding the NFT track, the 404 protocol, which focused on the concept of "token conversion" in the first half of the year, once caused market FOMO. The price of the Pandora protocol token PANDORA once exceeded US$30,000, an exaggerated increase. The subsequent 314 protocol (for details, please see the "314 Protocol Conference" Is it the next ERC 721? (article) etc. also brought attention to the market in a short period of time, but in the end it was lost to everyone because of unsustainable liquidity.

There are three other things worth mentioning about the NFT track in the first half of the year:

• First, with the help of the Meme coin craze in the Solana ecosystem, Base also attracted a certain amount of market liquidity in March and April due to the low cost of ecological network interaction. Among them, NFT also briefly gained a certain amount of market attention. We once said in " A detailed breakdown of the top NFTs in the Base ecosystem. Whoever rises or falls will receive the currency? "The article introduced some representative projects. Although no project successfully broke through later, it can be regarded as bringing some increments to the NFT track in 2024.
• Second, this year is the year of the U.S. presidential election. As the Republican presidential candidate, Trump has also "frequently made efforts" in the NFT track. He had previously launched the first NFT series "Trump Digital Trading Cards" in December 2022. "; Two new series of NFTs "Trump Digital Trading Cards Series 2" and "Mugshot Edition" will be issued in 2023. With these NFTs, Trump's total profit is as high as 7.15 million U.S. dollars, which is also confirmed from the side-Celebrity Name Human NFT The ability to attract money is indeed very strong, although the result is likely to be nothing.
• Third, Charlotte Fang, the founder of the well-known NFT series Milady, also launched a fund-raising event in June, announcing the release of a Meme on the Ethereum chain called CULT, which raised more than 20 million US dollars in just 7 hours. , the market's enthusiasm and enthusiasm for Meme coins are still surprising to the point of staggering. But no one thought that it would only take half a year.

In the second half of the year, the aftermath of the above incidents will continue.

The second half of 2024: internal and external troubles and the currency

issuance boom

As time enters the second half of the year, as the Meme coin craze is in full swing, the NFT track is once again ushering in "garbage time".

Countless blue-chip NFT projects have disappeared, as if they have disappeared from the public eye. Only a few NFT project founders such as Pudgy Penguins and Weirdo Ghost Gang are still active on the X platform, paying attention to market developments and occasionally reporting Below are the current status of the project and your own views on the development of the industry.

What once again drew people's limited attention back to NFT was the former "world's largest NFT trading platform" OpenSea - and the "encryption public enemy" it faced - the US SEC.

At the end of August, according to market news, the NFT market OpenSea received the Wells Notice from the US Securities and Exchange Commission; it became another "targeted encryption project" after Coinbase, Lido, Bittrex, Uniswap, and Robinhood. Taking advantage of this matter, we also received a notice from SEC Wells in "OpenSea" at that time. Is the NFT track scheduled to be defeated in advance? "The article provides an in-depth explanation of the current industry issues of NFT. The trend of many subsequent NFT projects also confirmed our judgment at that time.

With the continuous development of the industry, NFT has gradually become the "identity certificate" and "rights certificate" of many projects. The former "IP carrier" and "collection value" have gradually been compressed. Many Web2 companies and brands have high hopes for the "marketing role". ” has had little effect, but the NFT track has ushered in another round of market expectations, that is-the issuance of coins by NFT platforms or NFT projects.

In addition to Blast, which is closely related to the NFT trading market Blur, the multi-chain NFT trading platform Magic Eden and the upcoming new version of OpenSea also have high hopes. Animoca Brands' NFT project Mocaverse, blue-chip NFT Pudgy Penguins, Azuki, and Doodles are also among the potential currency issuance projects.

In this way, the NFT market is procrastinating its own garbage time while waiting, and also looking forward to new hope while waiting.

In September, at the launch of the encryption project WLFI, US presidential candidate Trump attributed his change in attitude towards Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies to the success of his NFT series.

At the end of October, the famous crypto artist Beeple posted that "NFT speculators have left the market, leaving only core enthusiasts."

In November, according to CryptoSlam data, NFT trading volume reached US$356 million in October 2024, an increase of 18% month-on-month, breaking seven consecutive months of decline. In addition, the total number of NFT transactions has also increased. The total number of NFT transactions in October was 7.2 million, an increase of 42% from 5 million in September.

At the beginning of December, on the edge of the market’s patience being gradually worn away, the “NFT project currency wave” that countless people have been waiting for has not yet arrived. The first to arrive is the blue-chip NFT CloneX/ that once had a floor price of more than a dozen ETH. Sad news that RTFKT, the studio behind the clones, will cease operations in January 2025.

But it was too late for the market to grieve or even mourn for it. What followed was a wave of NFT project currency issuances that had been waiting for nearly 6 months——

On December 9, the Meme coin project CULT, which raised more than 20 million US dollars and was launched by Charlotte Fang, the founder of the NFT project Milady, was finally officially launched. NFT was briefly recalled by people for a while. For details, please refer to "CULT Finally Launched" , NFT’s bull market free ride or the last dance? "One article;

On December 10, the ME Foundation issued a document announcing that TGE has been launched. Users can apply for and pledge ME tokens. To receive ME tokens, you need to load the Magic Eden mobile application and complete the claim. All unclaimed ME will belong to ME. Pledger.

On December 17, Pudgy Penguins officially announced that PENGU is online and open for claim. Eligible participants can begin to claim PENGU, including holders of Pudgy Penguins, Lil Pudgys, Rogs and SBTs. Holders have 88 days to claim, and all unclaimed supply will be permanently locked/destroyed after the 88th day. For more information about Fat Penguin and the parent company behind it, please refer to our previously published article "Acquiring Frame, creating an abstract chain, and subverting Base. Can Fat Penguin carry the banner of the consumer economy?" ”, “Fat Penguin’s currency is about to be issued, can PENGU, Abstract, and OpenSea eat the same thing? ” and other articles.

It is worth mentioning that the reason why Fat Penguin’s currency has been widely recognized by market users is because its pattern has been very large and airdropped to Solana ecology, many other NFT series holders and even the Ethereum ecology OG wallet in addition to its own ecology. Received varying amounts of PENGU tokens.

At this moment when 2024 is coming to an end, the suspense of currency issuance in the NFT track is gradually revealed one by one. Later players include OpenSea, which has registered a foundation in the Cayman Islands. The founder threatened that "Animecoin will have both vision, product and reality." Use cases, "Azuki is different from other meme coins", and even Doodles, whose founder hinted that the project will soon issue coins. But whether they can replicate the wealth-making miracle of Fat Penguin and PENGU is still unknown.

Conclusion: When the NFT narrative is no longer sexy, issuing coins

becomes a double-edged sword

Finally, from the perspective of industry data, according to CryptoSlam data, the annual sales of NFT in 2024 will be approximately US$8.5 billion. Although it is far lower than the peak in the past few years, the number of buyers has rarely seen a growth of over 62%. reached 7.5 million people.

Although the narrative of NFT is no longer as sexy as it was in 2022, and can easily attract millions, tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investment, there is no doubt that as a technical means, it is still indispensable in the encryption market status and role. Of course, for NFT projects, issuing coins is not a good thing with all benefits, but is a double-edged sword with pros and cons: the issuance of coins is smooth, the token price is reasonable, and market users have considerable returns or are relatively satisfied, then everyone is naturally happy; But if the NFT project does not have a clear and comprehensive plan, but regards currency issuance as the "last life-saving straw", then the final outcome will most likely be drowning in water.

After experiencing a period of opening high and moving low, or rather opening low and moving low, the NFT market can now be said to have entered the bottoming out stage. As for whether it will usher in a new round of revival in 2025, it still depends on the market narrative direction, funding flow and focus of attention.

But no matter what, the story continues, NFT will always be the endorphins that stimulate the crypto market, and money never sleeps.