Today, we’re incredibly grateful and excited to announce…

Curio Pro and Curio Key are both launching on September 10th, 2022. 🚀

Curio Pro is our premium offering

Curio Pro has an exciting roadmap that will continue to set us apart from the growing number of options and tools in the non-fungible token (NFT) intelligence space. Our upcoming Curio Pro features will rethink the way that we trade NFTs by creating a marketplace for NFT intelligence, and continue to save you time with speed-first features.

The unveiling of Curio Pro marks the introduction of our first premium feature: Custom Gas Strategy. When you’re trying to snipe a purchase, it’s critical to have control over the gas fees (Gwei) submitted with the purchase to make sure that your transaction is prioritized (and successful). This will remain true after the upcoming switch to Proof-of-Stake.

Until now, Curio has been entirely free to use while it’s been in development. After September 10th, a handful of Curio’s features will be exclusively available to Curio Pro users. The free version of Curio will remain a strong tool, while Curio Pro will unlock the most advanced features to make better investment and trading decisions. You can read the full details of the changes here.

Curio Pro is priced at 0.1 ETH per month, with wholesale discounts when you buy in bulk. From now until August 31st, Curio Beta users can pre-purchase a subscription for 50–70% off. Pre-purchased subscriptions will become active on September 10th. All Curio Pro features will remain free of charge until that day.

Curio Key is our exclusive membership pass

Fundamentally, we believe that providing an NFT pass for our community is essential to rewarding and aligning incentives with our community members. Above all, we want to proceed in a way that supports the long-term viability of the project while rewarding loyal holders and innovating at Web3 speed.

Therefore, we’ve decided to launch a limited free mint that gives lifetime discounts to Curio Pro and provides unique advantages and access for Curio Key holders that will give you a leg-up over non-key holders.

Mint Date: September 10th
Mint Price: Free
Supply: Up to 1,000
Allowance: 1 per wallet

Curio Key Holder Benefits

• 20–60% off Curio Pro subscriptions
• 20–60% off GM Curio Discord Bot subscriptions
• Priority access to new & experimental features
• Priority support
• First dibs on 🔥 merch drops
• Special Discord role & private channels with the team
• Exclusive events with NFT influencers like Gary Vee, Cozomo de’ Medici, and Alexis Ohanian
• Allowlist allocation in upcoming drops
• … and more to come

Minting Process

The mint will last 12 hours and will happen in three phases: Scouts, Luminaries, and Explorers. (These are roles in our Discord server.) We will follow up soon with more details, and we’ll be launching a page to verify your eligibility later this week.

Why we decided against lifetime access

Our goal at Curio is to build a long-term, category-defining business. As we enter a bear market, we’ve had to take a closer look at our fundamentals and prioritize finding a path to sustainable revenue while we have the advantage of being well capitalized.

We studied a number of other tools and projects that have launched NFT passes and researched the unit economics of their businesses. Our takeaway is that, while launching a lifetime pass serves as a great initial injection of cash flow, it ultimately limits the long-term revenue potential of the business as it caps the subscription business to the floor price of the token. Moreover, secondary royalties aren’t a significant source of revenue.

Looking ahead, we have some interesting ideas around pathways for power users to earn lifetime access rewards by other means—more on that later. 😉

Join our team & community

If you’re interested in working on the future of NFT intelligence, take a look at our job board or just email us at work@curio.tools.

Follow us on Twitter and join our Discord.

Retweet us if you’re hyped!

Curio on Twitter: "🚨 Curio Key is dropping on September 10th 🚨Mint Price: FreeSupply: Up to 1,000Limit: 1 per walletLifetime discounts on Curio products, exclusive access to the team & features, special events, and more.Full details within 👇🧵🔊 SOUND ON 🔊 pic.twitter.com/6inOWRVjqc / Twitter"

🚨 Curio Key is dropping on September 10th 🚨Mint Price: FreeSupply: Up to 1,000Limit: 1 per walletLifetime discounts on Curio products, exclusive access to the team & features, special events, and more.Full details within 👇🧵🔊 SOUND ON 🔊 pic.twitter.com/6inOWRVjqc

Co-founded by Chrys Bader and Sean Dadashi in September 2021, Curio was born from a desire to get the NFT insights we wanted, faster and more intuitively. Switching between tabs to get information from different tools felt inefficient, and the UX often fell short of our expectations. Last September, we set out to create a powerful multi-tool that is simple to understand, a joy to use, and ultimately saves us all time.

Since then, we’ve grown a wonderful community of beta testers. So far, over 1,000 pioneers have joined us in testing and building Curio. With their continuous invaluable feedback, we continue to improve every day. We’re grateful for the support we’ve received from our community and the relationships we’ve developed along the way.

Today, we’re letting more people in to test-drive Curio. All you need to do is follow us on Twitter and connect your wallet to get early access today.

Meet Curio Genesis

Our product vision is simple: We want you to give you time back to spend on the other things you love.

We hope to do this by making the fastest, most beautiful and robust NFT intelligence tool in the market. Our most common piece of feedback is the speed and ease of use, and that’s only going to improve with Curio Genesis.

One of the key challenges shared by analytics tools today, second to poor UX, is information overload. There’s a lot of data thrown at us, and we need to contextualize it and try to understand what is and isn’t relevant. It takes a good amount of time and effort to collect and trade NFTs, and we want to build features that will help you save time and make better decisions.

Curio Genesis plans to solve this problem by doubling down on features that allow users to build their own view of the NFT market; features like alerts, watchlists, personalized dashboards, and the ability to follow collections, wallets, and community members. We believe that by allowing you to curate what you’re interested in, we can deliver a more relevant experience that’s unique to you.

Learn faster. Act faster. Live more.

Join our community (and team!)

Curio’s mission is to serve, empower, and inspire the NFT community.

We are a community-first, values-driven organization built on the belief that the rising tide floats all boats, and that together we can create a bigger pie for everyone to benefit from. We’re inspired by the way NFTs are changing the world and want to build useful, groundbreaking, and reliable experiences for enthusiasts like ourselves.

Through technology, events, and storytelling, we aim to make Web3 a more inclusive and welcoming place — for everyone. We’re committed to increasing representation, equity, and empathy within the Web3 community, inclusive of all people regardless of race, religion, ancestry, disability, medical condition, gender identity, or sexual orientation.

We’re hiring curators, writers, engineers, marketing experts, data scientists, and more! If you’re interested in joining the team, apply within. If you can’t join the core team, we’d still love to have you in our community. Join our Discord and follow us on Twitter!

Last week, we published the first half of an interview with Elissa Maercklein (Emm) of Crypto.Chicks. Since then, Emm has become Chief Executive Officer of the 10,000-piece NFT collection that was released last year. It hasn’t been an easy journey for the CMO-turned-CEO; the collection has had its ups-and-downs this year, beginning with a Discord server hack in January, followed by serious plagiarism accusations about the origin of the collection’s art last month. However, the worst may be over as Crypto.Chicks seeks to reorient its North star. Below is the continuation of our chat with Elissa Maercklein, who has been eagerly shepherding in a new era for the collection — which may be its best yet.

You can read Part 1 of our interview here.

Editor’s Note: the following interview — recorded on March 10, 2022 — has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Part 2 of the interview with Emm, CEO and CMO of Crypto.Chicks

Andrew P. Rowan: It certainly seems like there’s a lot of whitelist grinding and hoop jumping to get access to mints these days. In your last response, you had mentioned finding communities that you resonate with. I want to talk about the Crypto.Chicks community, in particular this year, because the community has had some setbacks, most recently with the accusations of plagiarism around the art. I saw that you had to bear much of the responsibility in terms of the response and trying to get ahead of the situation. I’m curious, looking back now, if there’s any additional insight or if there’s anything that you would have done differently because in the moment, of course, information is developing and it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. So now with a little bit of clarity of time, curious about your thoughts and reflections looking back?

Elissa Maercklein: One of the things that was a learning experience for me is how quickly information spreads in the world of NFT Twitter, which is not necessarily a complete picture. I think there are very few people who have 100% of the information. I would argue, in fact, no one has 100% of the information, and with the psychological way that information just spreads like wildfire on Twitter, it’s important to be transparent, which I feel confident that we were transparent and are still being transparent at every step in the process. I think that’s why the community was able to maintain trust in us and the leadership team because we were very transparent in that we, just along with everyone else, learned on a Friday night about the allegations and it was news to us.

We were going to do everything aligned with our mission — which is empowering women in the world of Web3 — in order to understand first of all, what actually happened, how can we then address the situation, and come to an amicable resolution, if needed. We lived by our values, our principles, which are kindness, empathy, and transparency. And we, as a result, decided it was probably a good decision, if we were to part ways with Polly, who was the [19 year-old] artist who created the OG collection, which is the artwork that was in question in this event. Transparency is the most important thing to us. So the situation was directly the result of a lack of transparency and therefore not aligned with our values.

Crypto.Chicks is incredibly supportive of all women artists in this space so we are viewing this as an opportunity to uplift and empower multiple artists that we can partner with on future collections. We’re really excited about that as an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to our mission and our values. It’s also allowed us to reassess and take a step back in terms of ownership. The original founding team is brother and sister based in Russia, and they have have sort of realized through everything that’s happened, that it’s better for the future of the project to be run by the team who’s been operating Crypto.Chicks for the past three months, which is myself, along with the other women who are based here in the U.S. helping to lead.

I would be remiss if I didn’t call out how admirable that is. It takes someone really humble, and who really cares about the betterment of the community to be able to say, “Okay, me being involved is going to cause more problems in the future. And so I’m willing to take a step back, because I understand that this is what’s better for the 4,500 people that have invested into this project and into this brand.” So we are just right now, finalizing all of the legal documents for a transition of ownership. [Editor’s Note: this transfer has since been finalized and publicly announced as of March 20, 2022.]

We’ll have a U.S. legal entity that is assuming ownership of the 10K collection of Crypto.Chicks and we feel really excited about what this means for us in the future in terms of how we’ll be able to build and grow the business. We aligned with our value of transparency, which I keep saying over and over again, because our goal is to be one of the most transparent NFT projects out there. There’s a lot of money flowing in the world of NFTs and we want to be fully transparent. It will probably take us a couple of months to get to a point where we’re basically saying on a monthly basis, “This is how much money is coming into the organization. This is how it’s being allocated. This is how it’s being reinvested back into the business.” And so we’re really using everything that happened in the past three or so months to reassess how we’re operating: How is everything set up from a legal and financial structure? We’re interested in how we can build and grow the community back to a point where people feel like, “Okay, this is a project that is being 100% transparent and everything that’s happening.”

APR: It’s an uphill battle in that sense because the core component that’s being called into question is the most visible part of the collection. Obviously, you have a strong community; I’ve seen the feedback that you’ve received from your community on Twitter. I think you’re right in the sense that people are standing by and they’re looking to move forward. But at the same time, I’ve seen some criticism on Twitter as well from people who are attempting, it seems, to support the perceived artists — who portions of the creation were inspired by — and I just want to give you the opportunity and the space to clarify anything or to share any additional information about that because as you mentioned before no one has complete information and even if you address things 10 times there’s always going to be an 11th person trying to ask about something that you thought was settled weeks ago.

EMM: Exactly, yeah, so just yesterday, we tweeted out in support of Amanda [Costa], the artist from Brazil. She has just joined another project called Fortuna, as their artist and Fortuna is an incredible organization. They’re creating a DAO, they’ve already partnered with a really well known and established nonprofit organization that supports women and is aiming to stop violence against women in Brazil. One of the things that made me most uncomfortable about this whole situation is it really kind of exacerbated this Web 2 mindset that women should be pitted against one another. And so we have been in contact with Fortuna. It’s a project we love, and we support. We were super excited to hear that Amanda was joining this project as their artist and wanted to take that as an opportunity to show the whole NFT industry like, “Hey, we love and support all women in this space.” And the narrative that has been created by other people is not true. So that was really important to us.

We were excited, we were able to show our love and show our support for Amanda, who is an incredibly talented artist. Separate from that we are still having conversations about how we can come to a resolution with her and the OG collection. There’s one Crypto.Chick in there, OG Crypto.Chick #2, that’s in question where actually as a part of this transition in the legal entity ownership, we’ve assumed ownership of the 10K collection and the OG collection, which is separate — it’s 200 pieces — that is being now set up as a DAO for the community. They will also have one-of-one artwork airdropped to them from new artists that we will be partnering with; more details to come soon. That will create basically like the top level privileges and access within the community. So we are taking a lot of steps to make this situation right.

I just think that it’s important for the NFT industry to recognize that the real world outside of NFTs moves much, much, much slower from a legal perspective from resolutions and negotiations. All of this stuff takes a really long time in the real world. So the fact that we were able to basically complete the acquisition of a multimillion dollar business in a two week time frame — including a term sheet, a purchase agreement, and having all of these lawyers involved — is a huge feat from the real world perspective. And so we just asked and we’ve been saying this over and over again with our community: just be patient. We are being as transparent as we can be about all these ongoing transitions and conversations that we’re having. But we can’t share everything until we’re actually able to share everything.

APR: I totally understand and it just creates more liabilities coming out of sharing prematurely. And, of course, there’s no magic, comprehensive, quick fix. So, I think anyone who’s had experience in Web 2, or is above a certain age would understand that. The only thing that I would like to say is, there’s almost a sense of like, “even though it’s not our fault, it’s our responsibility to try to make things right or fix them”, which is both, I think, a personal value and also sort of a mantra for the crypto community from what it sounds like. And, I commend you, because I assume February 18, and 19th were horrible days. I want to talk about the painful drop in price for the collection, the floor is currently at .3 ETH. I think, prior to three weeks ago, the average sale was like 2.75 ETH. So what’s the way forward for the collection, the community, and for the leadership team?

EMM: Yeah, I think floor price is a bad metric. But alas, it is the metric that people are fixated on. I think that the way floor price gets increased is through having a really clear vision for the future. And understanding that part of that vision needs to have a measurable and tangible impact for the community and value that is being given back to them. That’s our primary focus: how we can create this future and this vision where people feel like, “Okay, this is an asset that I need to be holding, because I’m going to get A, B, C, D, E in the future as a part of that.”

We, as a team, have experienced quite a bit. I joined the team in October and I think our floor price when I first joined, I first invested at 0.5. Then there was a long period during which our floor price was hovering between like .07 to .15 and that did not deter us from working hard. That didn’t deter us from all of our ongoing initiatives that we were building behind the scenes. There was a big increase in floor price in the beginning of January. There was a peak in many of the projects that were created to celebrate and empower women, which we were really excited to see. Now the overall market as a whole has taken quite a bit of a step down, which is unfortunate, but I think that will be good for the teams and the projects that are building with one to three year visions in mind as opposed to thinking about, “How can I optimize and maximize the floor price next month?” That’s not really a scalable approach for building something that will bring huge value to people in the long run.

We’re focusing on long-term initiatives and how we can understand number one, what would our community want to see in the future? How will they feel this value being given back to them? And then number two, how can we go and build that but also create it in a way where there are measurable milestones along the way where people feel like, “Okay, yes, this team is doing what they said they’ll be doing, we have faith and confidence that what they’ve said will be delivered in the future will actually happen.” So that’s our approach that we’re taking, more on building and creating the vision and then understanding the floor price follows after that with all of the pieces coming together.

APR: I totally agree. And I think a lot of short term thinking gets people in trouble, especially in a short timeframe. I want to switch over to collections before we run out of time: what criteria do you use to decide whether or not to “ape” into a project?

EMM: The criteria that I use is number one, who is the team? I strongly believe in investing in teams and investing in people and whether or not I feel like they have the skill set and the experience in order to actually execute what they say they’re going to build. For example, a big red flag for me is if someone says they’re going to be building a mobile app or building a Metaverse or something like that, and they have no one on their team that has experience in product management or mobile app development or something like that. So having a really clear understanding of who is the team, what is their professional background? And then what are their personal values? What is their mission? So that’s my biggest criteria.

Number two, I would say is the community. I try to, as I said earlier, go into a Discord just kind of be a little fly on the wall and see what people are talking about. If it’s meaningful conversations, that’s incredible, I love that. But if it’s a lot of people saying, “LFG, LFG, WAGMI!” all over again and sending GIFs, that’s probably not super interesting for me from a long term investment perspective. Because I’m thinking about my investments and what will I see one year from now really changing the world of whatever domain they’re going after? As opposed to, “What can I buy today and then sell tomorrow for a 20% increase in price?” That’s not super interesting to me.

Those two are probably my biggest criteria. And then I think about probably an overarching principle: there is a mission. So I try to invest with conviction, understanding that I need to find missions that are aligned with what I care about, what I’m passionate about because I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m thinking like, “Oh, I’m gonna sell this next week, because I don’t really care about what they’re building for the long run. I just want to make a quick buck.” And that’s not, as I said earlier, something I’m super interested in so having a really clear understanding of what they are trying to change in the world interests me. And is it something that I agree should be changed and therefore I want to invest in the team that I feel confident has the ability to execute that.

APR: I totally agree on those points. Alright, so last question: which in real life events, if any, do you plan to be at later this year?

EMM: NFT.NYC is an event I am looking forward to and the Crypto.Chicks community is looking forward to because we will have an event there that we’ll be hosting. And I’m really excited to be able to meet people face-to-face. You can build a lot of interpersonal relationships over Discord, over Twitter, but it’s so much more exciting to be able to meet those people in real life to shake their hands, to see their faces smile. And so I’m really looking forward to that.

APR: Yeah, totally agree. It’s not the same. With Zoom and Discord, you don’t have the same rapport. And I think we’re all tired of social distancing these past two years because of the pandemic. Again, I want to thank you for your time and I do appreciate your candid responses and insight into what has been a difficult time, I assume, in the last month and I’m looking forward to seeing how the Crypto.Chicks community, in general, picks itself up and goes on to higher accomplishments.

EMM: Yes, well wonderful. Thank you for giving me a forum and platform to have my voice and the story of Crypto.Chicks be heard. Thank you.

It’s always difficult to step into a project post-inception. But, I think the best lesson here is that the truth always comes out so it’s better to get ahead and try to make things right with the support of those who have been aggrieved by a particular situation. We wish Emm, the entire Crypto.Chicks team, Amanda, and Polly well and hope that everyone takes advantage of this teachable moment. No one is perfect, and making a (big) mistake at 19 years old isn’t the end of the world, but we should all try to not repeat past errors. Is that your takeaway as well? Or did you reach a different conclusion? Let us know in the comments below!

Did you enjoy this writeup? Feel free to let us know and share what topic you’d also like to learn more about. We’d love to hear from you.

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Your Research Partner, Curio

Today, there are a number of up-and-coming women-oriented NFT collections. Crypto.Chicks, arguably the “first female avatar” collection, was among the wave of female-focused collections which skyrocketed to fame in 2021. (A 1/1 was launched on OpenSea in May, 2021 but the more well-known 10,000-piece collection was launched in September, 2021.) Last week, we were able to chat with Emm, also known as Elissa Maercklein, who has been a supporter and a leader of Crypto.Chicks as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)of the collection.

Interview with Emm, CMO of Crypto.Chicks

Editor’s Note: the following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity

Andrew P. Rowan: Hey, Elissa, thanks for joining me today. Can you please give me an overview of your role on the Crypto.Chicks team?

Elissa Maercklein: Yes, thank you for having me. I’m excited to share a little bit more about myself, about Crypto.Chicks, about women, and Web 3 as a whole. So I am one of the leaders at Crypto.Chicks. I actually have a kind of interesting story: I started first as a community member, having those kind of gender ambiguous animal profile pictures as I was engaging and interacting on Discord, and on social media, and was finding that frequently people would make the assumption that I was a man, which statistically, if you look at the representation within the NFT industry, people would most likely not be wrong in making that assumption.

However, for me it was not the case, as someone who identifies as a woman. So I just found myself over and over again, correcting people saying, “Oh, actually, I’m not a man, my pronouns are ‘she/her’, I am a woman.” And that was getting to be really frustrating, but also demoralizing because it made me feel like as a woman, I wasn’t expected to be there. I didn’t really feel like it was a space that was set up for me to be successful, and to be a contributor to the ecosystem.

I got introduced to the world of Crypto.Chicks through another project that I was invested in. There were a few community members that had minted, and were excited about the project and sharing it on social media. And that was the first time I thought to myself, “Okay, here’s an opportunity for me to actually have a representation of myself in the digital world that really looks like me.” So, it has the same hair color, the same attitude, the same clothing style, the same skin color, etc. And for me, that was really meaningful.

I joined the team first, just as someone who was helping to run the Twitter on social media. And as I got involved behind-the-scenes, I started to realize how similar NFT projects are to startups, which is where I’ve spent my whole career: building and growing startups. And I thought to myself, “Hey, there’s a lot of opportunity here to actually take a lot of these operational excellence principles and import that into the world of NFTs and really start looking at NFTs as companies and startups as opposed to passion projects”, which is what I think for the past… I would say six or so months, we’ve started to see a little bit of a shift in the market towards that but really not so much yet.

APR: I agree with you that that sense of formalization is just beginning to emerge and it’s an exciting time in general to set good examples and best practices.

EMM: Yeah, so one of the things that I think we sort of struggled with in the beginning of Crypto.Chicks is understanding something as basic as roles and responsibilities. There’s a lot of comparisons between roles at a startup and roles at an NFT project in that you need people responsible for marketing, responsible for moderating, which I liken to customer support. There’s all sorts of comparisons there and roles, and I think we didn’t have a lot of clarity on expectations. So the way that people can be most efficient and successful in their role is having a very clear understanding of what are they responsible for. And what are they, the little mini CEO, within their own domain, and then giving them the autonomy and power to operate underneath, understanding, “this is exactly what I’m responsible for.”

So going through that process of scoping out roles, scoping out Objectives and Key Results, so that people can really feel like, “Okay, I know when I wake up today, this is how I can be successful and what I’m meant to be doing.” And I think that having that level of clarity, number one, helps with people operating because we’re not all sitting in a room working together. There’s a lot of asynchronous work that needs to be happening and people need to be able to operate independently in a really highly efficient manner. So having trust in the team and establishing what’s expected of them is a big thing.

APR: So in terms of operating, I want to talk about the roadmap of Crypto.Chicks. According to the website, the current focus is on community events, correct?

EMM: We actually are redoing our website right now so we have a whole new website coming soon with a new roadmap and a much bigger vision that I can’t talk about too much yet, because we haven’t announced it yet. Basically, reestablishing our Northstar vision is to be the one-stop-shop for all things related to empowering women in Web 3. So there’s a lot that goes into that, a lot of different parts of Crypto.Chicks that we will be building up over time, but that’s ultimately the Northstar vision.

APR: I did see on Twitter that there is this initiative, the Crypto.Chicks Council Members. Can you talk a bit about what the purpose of the council is?

EMM: So we’re putting together two governing bodies right now. One is the Community Council, and that is nominated from the community, people who are very active and engaged, community members that we want to have involved in really high level strategic conversations about what do we think would be valuable for the community to see in the future. The other governing body that we’re putting together is an advisory board. And these are people who are executives, really high-level domain experts in various industries that come from very diverse backgrounds, also nominated by the community, and also will be voted on by the community.

I think any good leader should acknowledge that one person or one small group of people is never going to be better than a large group of incredibly intelligent and diverse backgrounds. And I think it will also help us to be more creative, but also tap into the expertise and connections and networks of folks that we have within our community. We’ve already started the community nominations. And so we have a shortlist of people that will be voted on over the next week or so by the community. And it’s CEOs, boards of major organizations, people that are on boards of nonprofit organizations, we have people who are PhDs. And so it’s a really interesting, diverse group of people that I think we’ll be able to learn a lot from and have guide what we decide to do in the future in a really high level strategic way.

APR: Now you said “people” you didn’t say “women”, specifically. So does that mean that the community council and the advisory board are going to be made up of mixed genders?

EMM: That’s correct. I strongly believe that diversity means representation of people from all genders, all backgrounds, and every different parameter upon which you could measure diversity. And the reason for that, I think, is important for us to acknowledge that, yes, right now, the vast majority of crypto/Web 3/NFTs are men. And it’s really important to have men that want to act as allies to women to help empower, uplift, and create space for those voices to be heard. And so we want our board to be a diverse representation and I don’t think we would be able to say that in good faith if it was just one gender or just one ethnicity or people from one type of vertical or industry, etc. So we really do want it to be a representation of what we feel our community represents, which is men, women, non-binary folks and that’s really important to us, having the board and the Community Council be representative of who our community is.

APR: For newcomers who are entering the space, what do you think is the biggest thing that people outside the NFT community misunderstand?

EMM: I think the biggest misconception as a whole about NFTs, is that they’re just JPEGs. So, for example, my parents have recently joined the Crypto.Chicks community, and they themselves were thinking before, “You’re spending so much time working on what? Like, what are you working on? That’s crazy.” And then when people join the Discord, they join Twitter Spaces, and they hear the community and the type of social impact that people are orienting around, they realize that the pictures are a part of it. The artwork obviously draws people in, but it’s the community and understanding how you can drive change forward in the world with a group — a very close knit group of like minded individuals that are passionate about the same mission and the same cause. And I think helping people understand that that is a really interesting way to connect people from all around the world.

Crypto.Chicks isn’t just people in the United States. It’s not just women. It’s really everyone from all cultures, all backgrounds that are excited about this mission of empowering women and empowering people that are new to the world of Web 3. I think it’s also important to call out that NFTs are sometimes a little bit cost prohibitive for people — I think in like 67, out of the 84 countries where it’s measured, the average income per month is under USD $1,000. And if you look at the price of NFTs, that’s a considerable chunk of someone’s average monthly income. So it’s important to recognize that if you really truly want to build diverse communities that are globally represented, there need to be ways for people to join and participate in the communities without actually having to spend what would be such an exorbitant amount of money based on the cost of living in the area that they’re from.

APR: There’s definitely an orientation in the space towards the global north, more specifically the U.S. and largely Europe. And I think it’s a valid point that if one of the core values of Web 3 is inclusivity, based on pricing alone, it prohibits the participation of many people to be digital asset holders. Along those lines, what are you concerned about in terms of the future of NFTs? And then also what advice do you have for women who want to dive into the NFT community?

EMM: I’m most concerned about the rising costs. I think many of us have seen the mint prices, which should be the lowest entry point to a collection because it’s the primary sale where you’re buying directly from the artists and the team themselves. There is a very, in my opinion, alarming trend where prices are increasing from when I first joined the market, it was pretty normal to see things around like .05, .06 ETH. And now we’re seeing prices in the magnitude of .5 ETH, .6 ETH, sometimes upwards to 1 ETH. And I think if we go back to what we were talking about, about the core principle of inclusivity, within Web 3, that is a huge amount of money that inherently cuts off the vast majority of the world from ever even having an opportunity to join.

And I think that minting as a whole is the best opportunity for everyone to be able to join a community but recently, you need to spend a lot of time in Discord to get onto a presale list. It’s kind of feeling like we’re moving away from the inclusivity and the All of We’re All Gonna Make It which is the slogan of Web 3, in my opinion. So I think being able to educate people on, “Hey, this is how we can reframe the minting experience and the presale experience to be inclusive and make sure that the people who are actually aligned with the mission and the vision and the values of this community have an opportunity to enter the community right at the beginning”, as opposed to people who are just there for financially motivated outcomes.

Second question on what advice I would give to women that are interested in getting into NFTs, into crypto, into Web 3… I would say find communities. There is a lot to learn. There’s a lot of acronyms, it can seem very scary to be perfectly candid. And so finding a community where you can engage and interact and learn a lot from people without actually spending any money yet, I think is the best way to dip your toes in the water and really find what communities do you resonate with, which communities have a mission that you really feel excited and passionate about, values that you feel aligned with personally.

I tell everyone to just spend two weeks learning as much as possible. Don’t spend any money, don’t buy anything. Just spend two weeks being a sponge and join Discords, chat with people, understand what different projects are about, what is their ethos towards building communities, and everything like that. And really, really be careful about what you see on the internet and trusting like influencers and things like that. So that’s what I would say is my biggest advice: just be a sponge before you put any money into anything.

That was some great advice coming from Emm on how to break into the NFT community. We’re still early in the space so there will most likely be more misconceptions that come to the forefront when it comes to utility, custody, and, most importantly, the future of NFTs.

Next week, we’ll publish the second half of our interview with Elissa Maercklein, which will cover a brewing new chapter for the collection as well as a look back on some recent challenges that she and the team have faced head-on. In the meantime, I invite you to stay connected with Curio via Twitter and via our Discord server.

First, happy International Women’s Day to all the grandmas, moms, sisters, daughters, wives, aunties, and nieces out there. We’re a little more than a week into Women’s History Month and it’s safe to say that this month is off to a great start. Below is a roundup of what’s been happening in the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) community to celebrate, promote, and inspire women.

A World of, for, and by Women

At a Christie’s evening sale held by the famed auction house in London, United Kingdom on March 1, World of Women (WoW) Woman #5672 sold for approximately 260 ETH or $750,000, surpassing estimates and marking the collection’s sixth sale over 100 ETH. According to data collated by Curio, the final sale price of Woman #5672 was more than 27 times the average sale price for the World of Women pieces transacted that same day on OpenSea. Considering the recent exposure and trail of partnerships the collection has blazed, it seems likely that the next non-charity public auction will also come in above estimates.

The following day, Billboard, the music company, announced a partnership with WoW to create a special series of covers featuring female artists in the art style of the collection. The artists included in the cover series are Christina Aguilera, Madonna, and Mariah Carey, so it’s no surprise that the physical Billboard magazines sold out in a day.

The very next day, at the Billboard Women in Music Awards 2022 in Los Angeles, WoW founder, Yam Karmai expressed her views on the future of the pioneering collection and its community:

“Last year, only 5% of NFT sales were by women. Only 5%. That’s real bad… but I’m proud to say that World of Women is changing that… and all of this would not have been possible without our community. They are passionate, like-minded individuals who want equal opportunities for all in this new, exciting space and in society today. There has been a shift in the space but we still have a long way to go.”

Each NFT version of the Billboard cover will be exclusively auctioned off on FTX and a portion of the proceeds will go toward preventing domestic abuse. As we pointed out in our WAGMI article earlier this year, WoW has attracted some big-name attention, in part due to its innovative community efforts. Reese Witherspoon’s media company, Hello Sunshine, is partnering with the collection to develop its characters into film and television media, in addition to an in-person event component. So be sure to keep an eye out for engaging scripted and unscripted content in the near future featuring WoW characters. It’s an incredible accomplishment for a collection that only launched this past July — not even a full year ago — but there were signs of pent up demand for women-represented NFT collections since all 10,000 WoW pieces sold out in a matter of hours.

However, WoW isn’t the only collection making history or major moves; today, Boss Beauties became the first NFT collection to be displayed in the United Nations Headquarters (UNHQ) in New York City. In fact, Boss Beauties has been on a recent roll with partnerships, including the New York Stock Exchange (also as the first known NFT to be displayed there), Rolling Stone magazine, Neiman Marcus, Marvel, Verizon, and Target. Boss Beauties is also partnering with an American icon, Barbie, and will auction off a Barbie NFT — along with the entire Boss Beauty Role Models series — on OpenSea beginning tomorrow, March 9, through March 12, 2022. The auction’s proceeds will benefit the Boss Beauties Scholarship Fund for Women and Girls.

Another female-founded collection, Women Rise, brought in March by officially becoming one of the latest collections to partner with Coinbase NFT. (Check out our recent Twitter thread on Coinbase NFT here.) The founder of Women Rise, artist and activist Maliha Abidi also hosted a fireside chat with Malala of the Malala Fund on March 3, and released the full video of the interview this past Sunday.

From Web 3 to IRL

Amidst the giveaways, celebrations, and Twitter spaces, you can catch an NFT in real life at the Seattle NFT Museum, the first-ever NFT museum which opened earlier this year in Seattle, Washington. Currently, an exhibit titled Pioneering Women will be featured through the end of the month. Another in-person opportunity to be immersed in NFTs will be at SXSW in Austin, Texas. On March 11, the Unstoppable Domains Senior Vice President, Sandy Carter will be hosting a Featured Session on “Web3, NFT, Metaverse! 3 Easy Steps to Get Started.” Lastly, for our beloved SoCal readers, keep an eye out for NFTLA, which will be held in Los Angeles, California from March 28 to March 31. While the full agenda hasn’t been released yet, we expect that in the spirit of inclusivity there will be special attention to women in the NFT space, as well as women-led sessions.

If you can’t make it to Seattle, Austin, or Los Angeles then there’s an NFT art competition hosted by Rebel Society on Twitter which is wrapping up on March 11. In an effort to get more women involved in the NFT space as artists, submissions are encouraged via the #100WomeninNFTS hashtag. On Friday, March 25, examples of individual artists will be shared every hour for 24 hours. Full details of the competition are available here.

Although the NFT space is famously young, white, and male, the space is slowly changing toward a more gender-balanced orientation so perhaps in the future there may be a woman behind your favorite crypto project. What about in the meantime? Considering that, according to a recent study, non-crypto owning women perceive the crypto space as “scary”, “confusing”, and “risky” perhaps the best way to celebrate Women’s History Month is to gift an NFT to the favorite woman in your life (along with some real flowers, hopefully).

That’s it for our roundup, let us know in the comments which events you’re most interested in and which new ones are being announced. Feel free to tag us as well on Twitter for maximum visibility and hope to see you at a digital or physical event in the near future!

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Women’s History Month NFT Event Round-up

What: Boss Beauties Role Models Auction

When: March 9 to 12

Where: https://opensea.io/collection/rolemodels

What: “Web3, NFT, Metaverse! 3 Easy Steps to Get Started.”

When: Mar 11, 2022

Where: SXSW

What: Rebel Society Art Competition

When: Submit by March 11!

Where: Details here.

What: NFTLA

When: March 28 to 31

Where: Los Angeles Convention Center

What: Seattle NFT Museum’s Pioneering Women exhibit

When: From now until the end of March

Where: 2125 1st Ave, Seattle, WA 98121, United States

In our Women are Going to Make It article last month, we highlighted a few celebrities who jumped into the NFT space, which, as we pointed out, bring some much-needed female representation in terms of artists, backers, and holders. (WAGMI!)

Taking a wider view of the crypto landscape, these days it’s hard not to notice familiar faces pushing crypto products, whether it’s Matt Damon promoting Crypto.com or Jimmy Fallon and Paris Hilton comparing their Bored Apes on The Tonight Show. We’ll undoubtedly see more celebrities dip their toes into this fast-moving space and continue to make big waves for collections and collectors alike.

To build or to buy? Why not both?

Aside from investing directly into NFT startups, there are two ways that celebrities engage with NFTs: buying into an existing collection or launching their own collection, especially among accomplished athletes.

For example, NBA player Steph Curry launched his own 2,974-piece collection last year in honor of his record-breaking 2,974 three-point shots. According to the official site, 100% of the initial profits went to charity and 200 pieces were set aside for people who had helped Curry throughout his legendary career. As of publishing, the floor for the collection on FTX is set at $400. (Curry has an equity stake in FTX as one of several Global Ambassadors.) In 2021, Curry also bought a Bored Ape for approximately $180,000, which seems to be the preferred first NFT for celebrities.

Last year, celebrity involvement in NFTs ramped up as fútbol (soccer) superstar Lionel Messi launched his own NFT collection as well, tapping into his 300+ million followers on Instagram. Fans were able to join the “Messiverse” via Ethernity, which also hosts NFT-branded collections for celebrities such as skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, MLB player Fernando Tatís Jr., and NHL player Alex Ovechkin. As has been proven with NBA Top Shot, there is clear and strong demand from sports fans for NFTs: Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot, sold approximately $500 million in NFTs in the first six months of its open beta and the company is currently valued north of $7.6 billion.

Besides sports fans, non-athlete celebrities have also been boosting NFT sales and collection valuations. The latest big-name acquirer of a Bored Ape, arguably the most well-known NFT collection, is Justin Bieber, who purchased an ape late last month for 500 Ethereum — then worth $1.2 million — some 300% above the floor price. It’s no surprise that celebrities of his stature can afford to pay a premium (or flex) to “buy” their way into the space, an option that is out of the means of many people in Web3. Other notable celebrities who have purchased Bored Apes include Blink 182’s Travis Barker, rapper Eminem, former NBA player and franchise owner Shaquille O’Neal, and DJ Steve Aoki.

The real deal or real dealing?

As some have noted, it’s unclear if Justin Bieber actually bought the Bored Ape that he reportedly purchased — or if the funds came from elsewhere and he was compensated for his in-kind endorsement of a cluster of NFT collections. A few weeks ago, Bieber is alleged to have bought another Bored Ape for $444,000 and seemingly acquired Doodles, alienfrens, and inBetweeners NFTs. inBetweeners is a collection by Gianpiero D’Alessandro, the only designer of Drew House, an apparel brand co-founded by Justin Bieber. Obviously, some cross-collaboration among creators is expected but judging by the wallet transactions, it looks as if Bieber’s purchases were more likely coordinated by the founder of inBetweeners. If it’s just a matter of helping Bieber get through the process of buying his first few NFTs, then it wouldn’t be the first or only time celebrities have received assistance to get into the space.

Moonpay, a platform for buying and selling crypto, has a concierge service dedicated to on-ramping celebrities and other high-net-worth individuals into the crypto and NFT spaces. Several celebrities themselves, such as rapper Lil Baby, have mentioned Moonpay as a factor in helping them acquire their respective NFTs. Musician Post Malone even had a paid placement for Moonpay in a music video. In that regard, it’s hard to say that recent celebrity interest is completely organic but as the financial, utilitarian, and cultural aspects of NFTs evolve, new use cases will attract new and different kinds of celebrities to the dynamic space.

Currently, it’s unclear how today’s celebrities arrive at the decision to either purchase an NFT or launch a branded collection, and more specifically, on which blockchain to make their debut. For example, Snoop Dogg decided to launch “A Journey with the Dogg” with Crypto.com, while focusing on creating later collections with individual artists. Snoop Dogg is one of the most prolific high-profile collectors of NFTs, and has launched no fewer than three NFT collections, the latest being his recently-dropped album Bacc on Death Row. Earlier this month, he performed during Superbowl LVI’s halftime show but there was strangely no mention or reference to NFTs — specifically a Bored Ape — despite rumors otherwise of an “appearance”.

Instead, we got Snoop Dogg looking like he was donning a fly rug, perhaps an inside joke on us all. If so, then well played, Cozomo de’ Medici. Might there be more incognito celebrity collectors — and curators — lurking in the metaverse? (Or at least hanging out pseudonymously on Twitter?) It’s certainly possible given the respective precedents seemingly set by both Justin Bieber and Snoop Dogg. After all, you never really know who is on the other side of the screen.

Aligned incentives or left holding the bag?

Not everyone has welcomed celebrity involvement in NFTs with open arms; there has been some backlash from fellow celebrities such as Gotham lead actor, Ben McKenzie, who has been a vocal critic of crypto practices. On Twitter, McKenzie cited the potential for downside risk and fraud in the space. It was a markedly different take from Kanye West’s, who posted a hand-written note (since deleted) on his Instagram profile swearing off NFTs — for now. (But that’s Kanye, y’all.)

Still, for those celebrities who are onboarded into NFT communities, they will most certainly impact the value of those collections. Just as a Porsche formerly owned by comedian Jerry Seinfield is more valuable than a non celebrity-owned Porsche, a similar premium is to be expected for any celebrity-owned NFT (especially if paying above the floor price). For example, when Justin Bieber bought Doodle #8426 on January 29, 2022 for 13 ETH (~$33,000), other Doodles that also had the bandana trait skyrocketed in value shortly thereafter.

Getting a celebrity to buy into an NFT project may be even more beneficial to the founder(s) of a collection after factoring in an influx of new interest (buyers) into the project, combined with any existing royalties to capture that growing collection value. So there is an incentive for founders of NFT collections to attract as much celebrity interest as possible, if only for the additional financial gain and status that will follow.

Recently, there’s been some negative press highlighting these incentives and other transparency concerns from The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and CoinDesk, as there’s been an increasing number of victims of various crypto scams involving rug pulls, hacked Discord server tools, and code exploits. Unfortunately, there will likely be more victims of lax security practices, scam artists, and hype machines, and because credibility is sometimes hard to assess for new and emerging projects, perceived celebrity backing or founding could help forthcoming collections cut through the noise. As we’ve seen with non-crypto projects such as Fyre Festival, when a high-profile individual — in this case, rapper Ja Rule — lends his name to a project (or vision), it can be a double-edged sword that can cut deeply. (Perhaps Ben McKenzie’s warning is equally apt for his fellow celebrities as it is for the hoi polloi.)

Ultimately, successful projects have to live up to their hype and promises. And when one’s own credibility is on the line, the stakes are higher. But will a celebrity’s touch be enough to separate the great projects from the good projects (and bad ones) in a quickly-developing space with a lot of information asymmetry? That remains to be seen — but hopefully, more bad actors won’t join the fray.

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In 2021, the term “NFT marketplace” was pretty much synonymous with OpenSea, which had the lion’s share of volume throughout the year. Competitors in the space, such as Rarible, SuperRare, NiftyGateway, and Foundation, made continual efforts to displace OpenSea, but have seen little success as users have settled themselves to the most familiar platform. As evidenced in the chart below for the month of December of 2021, OpenSea has been monopolizing the market.

OpenSea transaction volume grew from $21.7M in 2020 to $14B in 2021. Due to this wild success, it was forced to scale quickly. The platform suffered from bouts of down-time, causing users to emphatically refer to it as “ClosedSea” or “BrokenSea” on occasion.

As OpenSea’s valuation stems from traditional venture capital funding rounds, users have bemoaned that they are unable to share in the success of the platform. Rewarding early adopters has become a commonplace practice across blockchain projects, and some would argue it’s essential. Notable examples include Uniswap, ENS, dYdX, and Paraswap who have all airdropped rewards to their users.

A New Competitor Emerges, LooksRare

In early January, a new platform called LooksRare was announced and it sought to address some of the shortcomings of OpenSea. The most visibly evident target from its onset was to give users more skin in the game, which it would accomplish by having lower fees that would then be given back to the community via a reward system and its token, $LOOKS.

$LOOKS is capped at 1B tokens in its emission schedule and has been distributed in such a way where the majority of the tokens would be provided to the community. This would be done via an airdrop, through staking rewards, and via trading rewards that would be paid out daily. The days are not periodized from hour to hour, but rather by periods of blocks on the Ethereum network, with a typical “day” lasting for 6500 blocks. As an example, if there was 100 ETH of volume for the day and you bought/sold something for 10 ETH, that transaction would receive 10% of the daily $LOOKS allotment, split among the buyer/seller.

Their airdrop strategy employed a technique popularly known as a “vampire attack”. Clamoring NFT collectors flooded LooksRare’s Twitter and Discord servers to sink their fangs into the opportunity. Rather than wait until they launched the platform, LooksRare delivered $LOOKS tokens directly to the wallets of Opensea users. The amount that each wallet received was commensurate with their trading volume over the previous 6 months. A vampire attack like this has been seen before in the DeFi space, when both SushiSwap and 1inch leeched onto Uniswap to try and steal liquidity alongside their user base.

Another reason their airdrop was particularly effective was because just days before it many users familiarized themselves with the claim process after having received $SOS and $GAS airdrops. It was an airdrop frenzy causing many to wonder both what was coming next and whether they should dump or HODL their new found wealth.

In the 21 days since its launch, the LooksRare marketplace has already seen $11B of volume compared to OpenSea’s $4B. This impressive volume has generated over $200M of platform fees and provided roughly $280M of trading rewards to users. Naturally, those who sold the $LOOKS airdrop immediately are regretting their life decisions, with the price of $LOOKS peaking at nearly 4X compared to its initial valuation. As of writing, it currently sits at a 2X multiple.

However, while the volume is spectacular, when compared to the number of active users, there’s a massive discrepancy. OpenSea still boasts 25X more daily active users than LooksRare. How is this possible?

Wash Trading for Rewards

According to LooksRare’s wiki, $LOOKS tokens are rewarded to users the day after trading, and each day there is a capped number of $LOOKS that are distributed across all users. The amount that each buyer/seller receives is proportional to the percentage of volume that their transactions accounted for of the daily volume.

What this means is that as the platform builds volume, the same transactions over time would receive less and less rewards. The reward amount also halves over 4 different periods, likely resulting in an incentive which tapers over time, rewarding initial users the most. One problem with this model is that bad actors or, “advantaged players”, as they call them in casinos, will try to manipulate this model by “wash trading” — repeatedly trading items back and forth between multiple accounts they own.

While wash trading could be a concern from a reward standpoint, LooksRare was pretty sure that they had this covered, even having a section within their documentation that spoke to the how/why. The tldr; the cost of the platform fee and collection royalty fee applied to each transaction (roughly Y% in total), would be high enough to make wash trading unprofitable.

While this idea sounds great in theory, when this was written they may have also forgotten what NFT enthusiasts refer to themselves as quite often… degenerates. Naturally, wash trading has ensued. Quite quickly the volume on LooksRare began to dwarf that of OpenSea as traders sent the same NFTs back and forth between a few accounts. From the LooksRare standpoint, the one piece of information that was either overlooked or discounted was that there are a variety of collections which do not have royalty fees, such as Meebits and Loot.

Case Study: Trader “Ape Doe”

While many have reported on the wash trading that has taken place, we wanted to dig a little deeper and look at this from the perspective of a single trader. So for the purpose of this section, wallet 0x72701F26Eea545F9c98E76D56643D382477375Ac, we’re looking at you!

This particular trader, which we’ll refer to as Ape Doe, is an opportunistic trader. They’ve done well enough in crypto to have liquidity of 200 ETH and, over the past few days, have been rolling the dice to see if their washed trades will produce more $LOOKS value than the corresponding platform fees.

On January 29th, the cards did not fall in their favor. Ape Doe lost roughly 2ETH on the day, in part due to fees, but similarly due to trade slippage on the LOOKS/ETH transfer, a pair that had declining desirability over the period of trading.

If you were to chart the volume of Ape Doe’s wash trading against a matrix of $LOOKS prices and Total Daily LooksRare volume, you’ll see that in the Phase A of $LOOKS trade rewards, there is opportunity for profits at a variety of cross sections (shown in green). In the case of trades on January 29th, a falling $LOOKS price paired with a higher than expected daily LooksRare trading volume led to a near break-even point.

In this way, the platform has properly dissuaded an individual, but since the net cost was low and the reward potential is high, the likelihood of repeat offense is high.

Halving of Rewards

With an upcoming halving of its reward distribution on February 10th, the daily distribution will be cut by 52.5% from 2,866,500 $LOOKS to 1,361,587.50 $LOOKS. This means the corresponding $LOOKS price and daily volume required to break even is more dissuasive. Due to this, many are wondering what effect it will have on the platform trade volume and token price, with wash traders having potentially less incentive.

Incentives within a platform’s tokenomics are difficult to create in a way that benefits all parties. In the case of LooksRare, they are seeing increased volume and therefore increased platform fees, so by their own account this isn’t the worst thing. In turn, it produces a fly-wheel economics effect which provides users with more staking rewards. It could be expected that this will taper as each of the phases continues, but if the decreased supply is met with increased pricing on $LOOKS, it’s possible that the incentive stands. One parallel worth noting relates to wash trading that the Rarible platform experienced back in April similarly due to token incentives. Users were incentivized to trade in exchange for the $RARI token, which saw wash trading peak in the April period before tapering. This decrease in volume saw a corresponding pull down in the price of the $RARI token itself as well.

So to the initial question of where will the platform go from here, we’ll have to wait 10 days to find out for sure.

A Bright Spot

One thing that is worth mentioning though is that despite the majority of the volume on LooksRare being wash trading, there is some real volume there too. According to a Dune.xyz dashboard created by @Howard_Peng, which removes transaction volume identified by wash traders, there has still been roughly $10M to $40M of real volume transacting through their platform. While this is still only 5% of the type of volume that OpenSea is seeing, it still shows that their features are taking root with an audience of users.

Creating proper tokenomics is no small feat and while using platforms like OpenSea may not offer the same dual-incentives, the user and provider can see clearly where each party is benefiting. While $LOOKS has generated buzz surrounding its airdrop and its trading rewards, it has also created novel features such as collection-wide offers and batch-listing cancellation. If one thing is clear coming away from each vampire attack, it’s that the increased competition is a good thing for the space and that in the end customers benefit more.

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By EthernetEric

Over the past few weeks, women-led projects have seen growth of 200% to 700% on their floor price, over 20K ETH of sales volume, and average prices at all time highs. All female projects have been increasing together, while the market as a whole has not. This is encouraging, because art and technology are two industries that have historically struggled with diversity. Such growth is a promising trend as we all work to build a more equal, open, and decentralized future.

A Chance to Make History

Web3 is being hailed as an opportunity to re-write the playbook for how consumers interact with product/service providers in a digital world. Many argue that for the first time power is being bestowed to the customer vs. the corporation, with respect to ownership data, property, and even Intellectual Property. But as the slate is being wiped clean, activists are trying to voice the importance of not falling trap to some of the same shortcomings seen within our existing model, where gender inequality is rampant.

According to Fortune, only 41 of the current top Fortune 500 companies have a woman at the helm of the ship. While this is progress compared to the 67 years the data has been tracked, 8% is still quite meager, especially considering that many reports have shown that the gap has widened throughout COVID. The crypto market is more of the same; according to a survey by CNBC from August of 2021, 16% of men announced exposure to crypto assets while only 7% of women had crypto assets within their investment portfolios. This 2:1 ratio has many worried that the systemic issues leading to this inequality will persist in Web3 unless there is a concerted effort to address them. Many of the projects that we’ll be covering within the NFT space have such a mission in mind, when looking at their roadmaps, but only time will tell whether this divide can be bridged.

In the same CNBC survey from 2021, it was reported that 4 out of 10 women did not have any investments at all, which shows the challenges associated with bringing more investors into a space categorized by most as a high risk and volatile asset class. This may also contribute to the widening gap between men and women within the crypto space compared to the traditional finance sector.

In NFT communities, female artists only make up around 16% of the art created according to a report by ArtTactic. Even more staggering, women are only involved in 5% of NFT sales as a buyer/seller. For this reason, artists have taken a concerted effort to create more collections which women can relate to, can embody, and can share with others to extend the reach and expand the audience.

This is an issue women have been enduring within the art world for quite some time. In many world-renowned curated art galleries, works of art created by women can be measured in low double-digit percentages. Because of this, groups such as the Advancing Women Artists have formed to help educate, research, and restore works of art that have been overlooked or misappropriated for centuries. While many of these organizations have not expanded from the physical to digital art world, their core values remain seen at the heart of many recent projects which are on the rise. If Web 3.0 is truly the start of something new, then it is time to change the guard, and bring voice to the many.

The New Guard

As with all good stories, it is helpful to start at the beginning. The first all female-subject NFT project was a 200 piece collection called Crypto.Chicks, created by MsPolly11 in May of 2021.

While this collection appears to be the genesis of the movement, it may not be as well known as projects like World of Women and Boss Beauties, which as of late have had high volume and a fast run-up on floor prices. The Crypto.Chicks launched a larger 10k piece follow-on collection of their own in September, where they’ve seen recent success following momentum from similar collections.

While the World of Women collection may not have had the early movers advantage, they were able to make up for their later arrival by creating a diverse community which sought to uplift one another. By developing programs such as the WoW Fund, which set aside 15% of the original primary sales (105 ETH) to invest in the work of other emergent artists, NFT holders could feel philanthropic with their purchases and submit suggestions for where the funds are spent. Furthermore, the community has also had a deep focus on social causes such as She’s the First and Too Young to Wed. By doing so, they have been able to bring funding and awareness to campaigns targeted at eradicating female-rooted injustices.

Word of this spread quickly within influencer communities and many celebrities/founders such as Reese Witherspoon, Eva Longoria, Gary Vaynerchuk, Shonda Rhimes, Logan Paul, and Liam Payne became holders only further making individuals bullish on the direction the collection is headed. Other significant women, such as Serena Williams, Ellen DeGeneres, and Paris Hilton have made waves in the space with PFP look-a-likes, charity efforts, and talk show appearances.

NFTs Holders Club on Twitter: "Reese Witherspoon (@ReeseW) just bought the Woman #6403 of the @worldofwomennft collection for 69 ETH (~$170.000).It is the 8th highest sale of the collection on OpenSea so far.#NFT #nfts #reesewitherspoon #worldofwomen pic.twitter.com/ovo7S7xTkq / Twitter"

Reese Witherspoon (@ReeseW) just bought the Woman #6403 of the @worldofwomennft collection for 69 ETH (~$170.000).It is the 8th highest sale of the collection on OpenSea so far.#NFT #nfts #reesewitherspoon #worldofwomen pic.twitter.com/ovo7S7xTkq

Not too different from WoW, the Boss Beauties collection is also built upon a foundation of women empowerment. Its founder, Lisa Mayer, has been building a global family of women and girls for the past ten years under the brand of My Social Canvas, and the Boss Beauties were the brainchild of their direct input. The founding team took 8 weeks to turn the project from vision boards to the output we now know today. Mayer’s program is focused on growing female representation in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math), with the Crypto/NFT community poised as a space with the most opportunity.

The Boss Beauties also have a culture rooted in pushing the status-quo, with a percentage of sales going towards scholarships and educational programs. They even had a portion of funds directed to the FameLadySquad, a competing collection, so FLS could establish a podcast about women in NFTs. Such partnerships and focus on the broader community have helped establish them as a key player within the genre. With further utility offered in the form of licensing fees, mints on upcoming collections, and a community-wide book club, owners are afforded more than the traditional PFP.

Boss Beauties on Twitter: "Make HISTORY with us!!! 🚀🚀🚀Funding a SCHOLARSHIP in honor of Louise Jones, the YOUNGEST woman to have a seat at the NYSE!✨Currently displayed outside the iconic Muriel Siebert Boardroom, honoring the FIRST woman to EVER have a seat at the NYSE!✨https://t.co/l8G8cvscM4 pic.twitter.com/coGkndSgle / Twitter"

Make HISTORY with us!!! 🚀🚀🚀Funding a SCHOLARSHIP in honor of Louise Jones, the YOUNGEST woman to have a seat at the NYSE!✨Currently displayed outside the iconic Muriel Siebert Boardroom, honoring the FIRST woman to EVER have a seat at the NYSE!✨https://t.co/l8G8cvscM4 pic.twitter.com/coGkndSgle

While these collections have garnered most of the headlines, there are many other communities in the process of building their own stories. Whether they are derivatives, geographically-focused, or recently launched, collections such as Alpha Girl Club, CryptoCoven, WomenRise, 8sianNFT, FlowerGirls, WomenandWeapons, and WoWPixiesNFT are worth giving a browse as well. If we missed one, let us know in the comments below!

Fundamentals

While for some it is important to have personal alignment with the collections they buy, holders also want to see strong fundamental attributes with respect to daily volume, purchase range, and unique-ownership. Across the collections featured above, their average price has seen continuous growth over the last 30 days and any volume lulls after surges have resulted in minor floor price corrections.

Comparing the surges in volume to the overall flow of OpenSea, much of the movement is asynchronous, inferring that the purchasing trends were spurred from general collection interest due to recent news.

The most noteworthy news being World of Women’s announcement that they had signed with Guy Oseary AND that holders would have complete IP rights to their WoW.

World of Women on Twitter: "We have exciting news to share 🥳🤝 @guyoseary is now WoW's manager🙌 We're updating our IP rights to grant YOU complete ownership of your WoW!More information on our Discord. / Twitter"

We have exciting news to share 🥳🤝 @guyoseary is now WoW's manager🙌 We're updating our IP rights to grant YOU complete ownership of your WoW!More information on our Discord.

This news was specifically noteworthy as Guy Oseary had recently come to a similar agreement with Yuga Labs, the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club. His connections in Hollywood, having managed Madonna, U2, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and his venture fund with Ashton Kutcher, Sound Ventures, have many excited about what utility he’ll bring to these collections.

With connections spanning the top Blue Chip projects, Hollywood, and traditional finance, women led projects have support emerging from all angles. As Web3 development continues, it is important that the community makes a united effort to remove the inequalities that have been present in tech/art for far too long.

Let’s manifest something good — Women Are Gonna Make It (WAGMI)!

Did you enjoy this writeup? Feel free to let us know and share what topic you’d also like to learn more about. We’d love to hear from you.

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Your Research Partner, Curio

In our last On the Rise (OTR) story we talked about how Doodles’ ascent to its current floor was meteoric, yet only one week later, we’re already looking for a stronger word to describe the start that PhantaBears has been having. Feel free to send us a thesaurus, because if these few collections are any indication of what is to come, we’ll need it!

As of writing, the PhantaBear collection currently has a floor of 3.87 ETH, 26K ETH of volume, and roughly 12.6K sales on record. Only 17 days after launch, this collection has been breaking records with its floor soaring as high as 8.9ETH before recently settling back to its current levels. For perspective it took BAYC 80 days to break a 5 ETH floor, Doodles 75 days, and CoolCats 59 days, while it only took PhantaBears a mere 8 days.

Naturally, this spike in demand has created interest in the collection. What caused such interest and who are the buyers behind these cuddly bears, we’ll take a look into that next.

But first… your daily reminder that this is not financial advice, DYOR!

Genesis Story

PhantaBear was established by Ezek, a celebrity avant-garde art focused entertainment NFT platform, which saw the potential of creating a collection at the intersection of Fashion x Music X Pop Culture. They partnered with Jay Chou, the Mandopop King, who is infamous for his many talents, including music, producing, acting, and magic.

Ezek’s founding team includes a technical serial entrepreneur, a musician/ lyricist of Jay’s, and a filmmaker who has made it his mission to bring Chinese culture to the Mid-East and West. Collectively they have the ambitious goal of creating a new type of entertainment within the blockchain world.

Jay’s rise to fame came just over two decades ago in 2001, with the release of his second studio album, Fantasy. Playing off of this, in 2006 Chou established the fashion brand PHANTACi (Phantom and Fantasy), which is much of the inspiration in the PhantaBear collection. His brand has released Autumn/Winter and Spring/Summer collections since 2018, as well as a number of co-branded partnerships (e.g. LooneyToons, Haruharu).

With over 30 million records sold and 6.9 million followers on Instagram, Jay’s partnership with Ezek has shown the potential of celebrity endorsements within the Asian market. The project has been touted as the BAYC/CryptoPunks of Asia, with many seeing the Blue Chip potential. However, while Jay has a large following, what made him an ideal partner was that his relationship with art has been long withstanding. Earlier this year, Jay partnered with Sotheby’s to handpick the Contemporary Curated : Asia collection, which included pieces by the likes of Picaso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, as well as a variety of other known and lesser known artists.

Quoted as saying that “true value doesn’t lie in the price tags” and that “art has no limits”, the Mandopop King is enamored by the experiences it can provide.

Mandopop King Jay Chou on Why Art Has No Limits

Utility

Self-proclaimed as BEAROS, owners of the 10,000 piece PB collection are granted membership to the Ezek Club. As VIP members, they receive discounts in the PHANTACi stores and have voting power towards future metaverse collections and merchandise. The inspiration of the traits within the collection came directly from the PHANTACi collection itself, so people can purchase similar items to their PFPs.

Since Ezek is an NFT platform, they will be dropping new collections with celebrity partners and BEAROS will have priority access to those mints.

Beyond this, they are also planning to work with their technical partner Matrix Labs to provide virtual experiences (e.g. concerts, events, cinema), since Ezek purchased a large parcel of land within the Matrix World.

Throughout the year, collectors have been promised physical gifts, access to a VR club, the ability to collaborate with tech firms on new metaverse VR glasses, and the ability to work on philanthropic efforts which will give back to the community.

The Rise

In the NFT space, we differentiate collections by their art, founders, and utility, but it is increasingly apparent that the most important attribute is community. While many projects are harnessing communities for the first time, icons like Jay Chou have existing fanbases that can show up at a moment’s notice.

The following statistics provide some perspective:

• Ezek’s Discord server saw 10,000 people join in the first day, 12.6k in 48 hours, and 17.6k in 72 hours
• In late December, Ezek’s Twitter account had 2,475 followers, and as of writing it has over 23.7k followers
• All of these members joined prior to PhantaBear announcing what chain the project was minting on
• The mint sold out in less than 5 minutes

To reach an 8.9 ETH floor in 9 days, a 34X return on a .26 ETH mint, demand must be surging. In PB’s ascent, much of the climb took place over 48 hours on the seventh and eight, and volume continued at pace on the 9th and 10th.

In the run up, each day saw strong signals that the climb would continue:

• Higher purchases (69 sales have been made at 10 ETH or higher, with 2 purchases occurring over 100 ETH)

• Further celebrity endorsements such as Steve Aoki (8.2 million followers), Will Pan (1.3 million followers), JJ Lin (4.6 million followers), Ashin_IG (1.3 million followers)

Steve Aoki on Twitter: "My dj @EzekClub phantabear is cooler than u pic.twitter.com/Kug7jlkEag / Twitter"

My dj @EzekClub phantabear is cooler than u pic.twitter.com/Kug7jlkEag

• Strong OpenSea volume contrasting the falling ETH/USD value

The Fall

Since reaching its all time high, the PhantaBear collection has seen a pull back with its floor dropping 11% over the past 3 days, 58% from its peak 6 days ago. The number of listings rose steadily and has since tapered at around 22% of the collection listed.

Contrasting this against many other recent high volume collections, one could begin to question whether its rise was sustainable. Similar pullback has been seen on other collections before, if we think back to Mekaverse and Crypto Bull Society to name a few. While the future of the PhantaBear’s is unknown, what we have seen is what the power of a strong pre-existing community can bring to the NFT space, which begs the question of what new celebrity projects we can expect to see next.

What would you like to see? Is it too far fetched to imagine a T-Swift NFT? Beliebers NFT? BTS?

Only time will tell, but as influencer-based drops continue to be a recurring trend, investors must be weary of the power of the crowd and how lasting its effects are in a speculative-based market.

Do you see another project which is OTR? Feel free to let us know and share what signal you discovered by scouring through the data. We’d love to hear from you.

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Your Research Partner, Curio

We’re fans of letting the data speak for itself, and in Curio’s On The Rise (OTR) series, we plan to do just exactly that by recounting the run-up to some of the fastest moving NFT collections. We’ve distilled some of our biggest takeaways for both aspiring-creators and holders alike, so without further ado, let’s take a deep dive into our very first OTR: Doodles.

But first… your daily reminder that this is not financial advice, DYOR!

In the past two weeks, Doodles floor has grown by 169%, volume by 419%, and unique wallets by 6%. What sparked this unprecedented growth?

Promising Beginnings

With an initial mint price of 0.123 ETH on October 17th, the Doodles collection’s ascent to its current floor price of 11.5 ETH has been meteoric. However, when one begins to look deeper, there were several leading indicators that paved the way to potential future success.

One unique aspect of the Doodle collection, was a promise to its holders to purchase back its mascot for 100 ETH, which it delivered upon a mere two days after launch. This signal allowed holders to entrust confidence with the founders, and brought increased demand to the rainbow puke trait associated with the mascot. The current floor price for the trait as of writing is 40 ETH.

However, beyond the founding team’s purchase, other NFT whales had taken note themselves, with @9x9x9eth securing four 1/1 Doodles for 192 ETH in total, only an hour after the initial launch.

9x9x9.🆘 on Twitter: "Here is my thought process the reason behind I bought these 4 doodles when the floor was 0.75, Paying 67x the floor price on the first hour after not being able to mint in the gas war pic.twitter.com/feudzJ6WYn / Twitter"

Here is my thought process the reason behind I bought these 4 doodles when the floor was 0.75, Paying 67x the floor price on the first hour after not being able to mint in the gas war pic.twitter.com/feudzJ6WYn

Paired with high gas prices on the initial mint, high interest from large wallets and a heightened costs basis, the floor price of the collection quickly rose to 0.7 ETH and stabilized around 1 ETH by the end of the first week.

However, even with a strong whale presence and trust-worthy founding team, the most promising aspect of the collection was the diamond-handed community. In response to the initial launch developments, holders started delisting instead of choosing to sell.

Rarity vs. Aesthetic

Within all communities, consumer preference/taste differs and you have individuals that are looking to make purchasing decisions based on different criteria. Rarity relates to the portion of the collection that possesses a given trait, with most collections considering any traits under 1% as rare. One collector may prefer a specific look, while another may be indifferent to aesthetics and more focused on an NFT’s rarity rank/weighted score.

In the case of Doodles, the founding team opted to not provide an official ranking partnership, thus allowing the community to weight their preferences accordingly.

At Curio, we allow our users to explore both rank/aesthetic together via our Trait explorer, so that aspiring holders can see where preferences are trending and pickup on the subconscious bias towards specific traits. By doing so, users can snipe deals either for the long-term hold or for the quick flip, depending on their personal trading strategy.

As seen below, a few holographic traits are on the rise in demand, signaling that they had previously been undervalued or simply were unlisted and are becoming available for purchase.

As the saying goes, knowledge is power, and this couldn’t be more true when browsing a collection of 10,000 similar NFTs. At Curio, we want to make it easy to analyze historical sales data/active listing data to infer trends and then make purchasing decisions upon them.

Volume is nice but a wide range is better

Another metric in the Doodles collection that has contributed to its rise, has been its consistently high sales which have occurred on a daily basis. With floor prices climbing from 4 to 11 ETH over the past few weeks, all days saw trades of greater than 70 ETH, with the peak purchase occurring on Wednesday when Pranksy purchased a Golden Ape for 296.69 ETH.

Pranksy 📦 on Twitter: "Welcome #6914! #NFTs @doodles https://t.co/UXF1tnWpFR pic.twitter.com/ZDoDRE8Tze / Twitter"

Welcome #6914! #NFTs @doodles https://t.co/UXF1tnWpFR pic.twitter.com/ZDoDRE8Tze

Such a wide range helps pull up the average purchase price, which in turn can pull the floor along with it. As many of the NFTs being purchased head to cold wallets, mid-tier ranking rarity and clean aesthetic Doodles are finding themselves on their own meteoric rise.

If we compare the range to the average sales price, it can provide insight into the strength of the rarest/most valuable assets in the collection. Above in the Doodles collection, the range fluctuated from 72 ETH (9:1 ratio) to 291 ETH (22:1 ratio), with it averaging at a 13:1 ratio between the range and average price of sales on a given day.

Comparing this to another collection, such as Gutter Cat Gang, you’ll see a much tighter range and ratio over a seven day period. In this collection, the range was its highest at 9 ETH (0.9:1 ratio) to 1.95 ETH (0.28:1 ratio), with it averaging out to 0.48:1 ratio.

While the future of the Doodles collection remains unwritten, at Curio we are confident that there is still much more which can be learned by sifting through the data. With new charts and dashboards becoming available on a weekly basis, we’d love to list your collection and learn along side you.

Do you see another project which is OTR? Feel free to let us know and share what signal you discovered by scouring through the data. We’d love to hear from you.

Want more? Follow us here on Medium
Want even more? Join our Discord and follow us on Twitter.

Your Research Partner, Curio