People vs Dollars

What is the most successful NFT project? CryptoPunks? Bored Apes? To answer, you would probably look at market cap, trade volume, and price floors as many folks do.

But that overlooks a critical element: people.

Startups often focus first on user growth before monetization. So, it’s important to also ask questions like how many people own this NFT, how many in the community Discord, and how many are consistently active users.

I saw an eye-opening metric this week: there’s 58,191 unique buyers of TopShot so far this month. That number has bounced between 47k and 180k each month for the past year.

Here’s the unique buyers of other popular projects this month:

• CryptoPunks: 235

• Bored Apes: 618

• Solana Monkey Business (most popular on Solana): 365

• Axie Infinity: 284,492

Yes, Axie Infinity also looks very promising. They were valued at $3 billion last year.

TopShot and Axie are leading a new trend for web3 projects: accessible and highly engaging fun, instead of exclusive and profit-seeking speculation. Axie is a game where users can battle and build up a collection of valuable assets. TopShot users race to complete Flash Challenges for rewards. And the trend is showing results according to this headline from top journalist in this space:

So let’s be sure to think about people. The money will follow. Or said differently:

Where there is community, there is commerce - Bill Tai