Whether you love or hate NFTs, it’s undeniable that they are big news in the tech space and likely here to stay. If you’ve already decided you hate NFTs, then this post is not for you, if you’re interested and want to know more, then read on.
Today was the big reveal day for The Royal Cubs NFT project, where the artwork of each NFT was revealed on NFT Marketplace, OpenSea. For the thousands of people who purchased a Royal Cub on Monday (Australian time) 3 days later, we got the reveal.
There were 8,888 NFTs created for the collection, which are created programmatically. Each 3D Cub features a different combination of hair colour, clothing and accessories, with some being more rare than others.
While most discovered what their NFT looked like today, there are 15 lucky people who received Legendaries (the most extremely rare Cubs), that will be revealed in a couple of days from here.
The process
The whole process of buying into an NFT project is really a rollercoaster of emotions. To begin, you’ll likely discover a project on social media or a link from a friend. From here you might visit their website, take a look at the project members, previous work done by the artists and the project roadmap to learn bout any utility the project is planning to offer in the future, above the art itself.
Once you decide you like what you see enough to invest more time, you’ll excitedly join the Discord chat to see who hyped others are. In Discord, you’re generally faced with a range of people who are there for the right reason, and many that are there to pump the project and flip it to make a quick profit.
There are lots of bots and serious reliance on moderators to address the many relentless spamming, using all caps and repeated questions are frustratingly annoying when there are channels like announcements, that explain exactly the questions asked, like what is the mint price (in this case it was 0.22 ETH + gas).
When the project was in the minting phase, there was a sense of urgency as you see reports of the numbers sold increasing towards the cap of 8,888. Time to stop watching, get off the fence and decide if you’re going to pony up the cash and invest in this NFT project, or wait for the next.
After determining there was no more research I could do, I took the plunge, mainly because I followed the links from the Cub previews to the artists themselves and saw their technical capabilities in creating realistic 3D animals using Maya (see the 3D ostrich tutorial here).
As you work through the practical reality of buying enough Ethereum for the Minting process, then getting that ETH into your Coinbase or Metamask Wallet your nerves are high and you need to resolve yourself to the fact that what you’re about to invest in, may not be seen as others as worth more than you’re about to pay.
There is no guarantee here, NFTs are risky business, be in no doubt about that. After coming to terms with the fact this could go to zero, I pulled the trigger, went to the website and clicked connect the wallet to mint 1 Cub from the Royal Cubs collection. Exciting.
Discord lights up with others sharing their purchases and with more than 240,000 people on the server, things were moving fast. It gives you a real sense that the community heartbeat is strong.
Next, you move through a couple of days of nothingness. Crossing your fingers and hoping you’ve done the right thing and hoping your NFT isn’t ugly. While you’ve seen samples and really loved the art, there’s a chance your individual combination could turn out bad and there are no second chances here, you get what you’re given in the random allocation.
So finally we come to today, reveal day.
Again Discord lights up and everyone’s asking what time reveal is. Again, this is answered, but of course, it gets repeated a thousand times. Early Australian time, around 4 am, I wake and check my phone, I see others starting to get their Cubs. I get up, grab the laptop and fire up my OpenSea account to see my cub. Nothing yet.. Nervous I refresh a couple more times, then go read the latest announcement post to find the instruction I needed, you need to manually click the ‘Refresh Metadata’ button in the top right of your NFT’s page on OpenSea.
After doing this, my Cub was revealed.
Meet Royal Cub #8495
I love it. I was over the moon when I saw this little guy for the first time. It didn’t matter what other people thought it was worth, I love the look of him.
Each of the 8,888 Cubs was created with individual properties, like Accessories, Earings, Eye Colour, Eye style, Fur, Glasses, Hats, Headphones, Mouth, Nose Piercing, Outfit etc.
I think this blend looks great, although having browsed through the others, I see many I like, but some I’m glad I didn’t get, this really is luck, not skill, so I feel like I did ok.
On Discord, I see the conversation rapidly turn to photos of everyone sharing photos of their cubs, with most happy with their outcome.
How Rare is my NFT?
If you are going to sell the NFT, you need to set a price. One way to do that is to determine its rareness compared to the others in the collection. To do this, you can visit a site like RaritySniffer. After comparing my attributes and how common they are to other Cubs, this site determined that I had a Total Rarity Score of 361.94 (the lower the better).
In terms of a Rarity Rank, my guy is #1,324 and out of 8,888 that’s not bad, pretty happy with that and if I do decide to sell it, I’ll definitely take that into consideration and price appropriately.
Even if this is just personal interest, it is great to take a look at these unique properties (also available on OpenSea, just 0.83% have white eyes, just 1% have the baseball glasses, 1% have the leather jacket with BTC necklace.
For me, it’s the combination of the orange jacket, orange fur, orange glasses, that works well together with the angry eyes and open mouth. Yep, I’m definitely biased and this is already the wallpaper on my phone’s lock screen.
The Bloody Floor Price
For the remainder of the day, the Discord channels have been flooded with conversations about the Floor price of the project. For those unfamiliar with this term, it’s basically how cheap, the cheapest NFTs is available for sale at, in the collection. This price appears to be used as an indicator of how well the project is going.
While some NFT projects seem to instantly climb in value after the reveal, that hasn’t happened here, with some prepared to sell at less than the cost of minting. This is a strange choice, to take a loss on the project and I assume move on to the next.
There’s a lot of heat for this in the community, as selling your NFT for a higher price is difficult when others are giving theirs away for a bargain.
Discord then lights up with an array of suggestions on how to remedy the fact the floor price had fallen to 0.154 ETH for the 2,120 items that are currently up for sale. This figure shows that the majority of Cub owners are holding, but from the chat in Discord, you’d think the opposite is true.
There is a concept going around of sweeping the floor, where people who really believe in the project, or have a lot of money to spend on doubling down, would acquire the on sale NFTs, in the hope the floor raises and each subsequent sale is done at a higher price.
I believe there are times when this buyback is done from the project itself, which has just netted millions of dollars during the minting process, so buying back 5-10% is treated as a standard expense.
This feels very similar to the now common practice of paying for celebrity endorsements to build hype and leverage their much larger audiences to build interest in the project. With additional interest, there’s additional demand and the hope is the price rises. As much as NFTs are supposed to be about the art, and some utility that is offered to hold NFTs, it is clear that the business side of this is alive and well.
With the reveal now done and some trading openly, there’s not a lot to do right now. Sure there’s the upcoming legendary reveal, but unless you have one, then this doesn’t really do much for you, other than make you jealous you didn’t get one.
This project has a fairly vague roadmap, certainly no timing, but does guarantee any Cub owners will get a spot on the whitelist for the next project for the Artists, Gorillas. There’s a reference to live events and activities, but I strongly doubt there’ll be any outside America, there’s also a reference to the Metaverse, without detail on which actual title the cubs could be used in.
Overall
Reveal day is done and while the highlight was the reveal of the NFT I purchased, the lowlight was seeing how much others are going for. Ultimately I’m using this experience to learn and share my NFT experience with others, to give real-world insights to people, and to understand it at a deeper level. Today, I learned a lot and that’s worth the price of admission.
I have no plans to sell, despite a bot making me 3 offers today, 0.14, 0.13 and 0.1 ETH. I’m in no rush here, will watch with interest over time.
One thing I would love to see the developers of The Royal Cubs do is make the 3D models of the Cubs available. While not everyone would be interested in this or have the skills, I’d definitely love to take my NFT and animate it.
