The Odd Feelings on Oddities
After what may have been one of the longest waits for an NFT that wasn’t in our hidden folders to reveal (Oddities), we finally got to see what the Moonbirds had regurgitated into our wallets along with hearing what some of the teased utility would be. Unfortunately, from the start of the reveal it was not received by the market as well as I’m sure most would have hoped.
As the art had started to reveal it was in true Gremplin style, which I am personally a fan of and thought fit the theme of what the team was going for with them being revealed from owl pellets, unfortunately this is when the controversy began. Anytime most people hold an NFT through reveal it is because the gambler inside of us is holding at the chance for a rare, knowing that by doing so there is a good chance the floor of commons will drop, but it is a risk we are willing to take knowing that we have that chance to hit a big pay day, especially from a project the caliber of Moonbirds and Oddities.
The problem is, after being told by Justin Mezzell, who is a co-founder and the chief product officer at Proof and Moonbirds, that the matching number of the oddity wouldn’t matter to the traits that the oddity had as shown in this Twitter thread, was quickly shown to not be true. As more revealed and it was quite obvious that most people had an even smaller shot at a 1/1 than normal, all of the rarest Oddities went to the rarest Moonbirds, whose holders are less likely to sell.
The next glaring issue that was approaching was much more concerning than art, and in my opinion the true reason people were buying oddities clear up to four eth, was the hidden utility that had been teased for the full two months. The market was buying in order to receive access to the utility that proof had shown for their holders up to this point, they were buying to have access to the club similar to the access that mutant apes give to the bored ape yacht club, for a discounted price.
The problem is though almost immediately it began to come out that there was no further utility to oddities outside of access to the discord, and that it was more of a fun art project as shown in this tweet below. If this had been made clear from the beginning, that it was just an art drop, it would have tempered everyone’s expectations leading into it, but would have probably cost the team a lot of revenue in secondary royalties.
The problem here isn’t for Moonbird holders themselves, but for the smaller wallets in the NFT market who were using most of their liquid eth to get into the Moonbird ecosystem, only to find out they were truly only buying for the art.
After the tides had begun to calm regarding the oddities reveal and utility there was yet another shifting sands issue from the team that further made it seem like there was not a solid gameplan in place from what is considered one of the top teams in the NFT space.
Before the oddities revealed it was announced by the founder of proof, Kevin Rose, that they would put a ten-day moratorium on any employees of proof buying or selling ten days before or after the reveal of any proof NFTs, which is a great thing in my opinion, especially after the controversy regarding the sniping of rare Moonbirds by team members on the day of mint.
The issue is this policy barely even lasted for twenty-four hours before it was announced on twitter that it would be lifted, leading to even more concern that there is no true game plan set in place by a top NFT team around one of the most hype reveals.
It has seemed to be a reoccurring thing surrounding oddities that the right hand did not know what the left was doing, this is something you would expect from an average NFT team, but not one of the teams that are supposed to be at the top. If the team and founders do not know what their own policies are and the game plan of their project more than a few days or weeks in advance, how is the market supposed to be able to understand the policies and of what is in store for the project.
For a project the caliber of Moonbirds the reassuring thing to most holders is at the solid decision making of the team, and to be able to make the tough decisions and stick to their guns, which is the opposite of what we have seen with the oddities, in my opinion the biggest issue is the wishy-washy ness of the decisions and announcements from the team.
No matter what they do they will truly never be able to make everyone happy with their decisions with as many holders as they have through all of their projects, but one thing they can do, and that most would respect is the ability to stick to their decisions even when times are tough. One of the things that I do respect is that this was acknowledged here by Kevin Rose as something that they will work on moving forward.
The true problem will be if this is a reoccurring thing moving forward, it will lead it to become hard to trust what is said by the team, which is the biggest thing that holders have is the faith in what the team says and the ability to deliver.
We are at a pivotal point of the NFT market as a whole, and Proof is regarded as one of the top teams who will be looked at to help lead the charge to the on-boarding of the masses, so the success of Proof and of Moonbirds is going to be crucial to the future of the NFT instruction. Hopefully these small issues are things that are ironed out by the team moving forward because in the business world small mistakes like this do not kill you when they happen but they crush you when they start to snowball and add up.
Things like this are easily forgotten the next time that something is dropped by the team, but if the community cannot trust that what is being done by the team is where the issues will arise. Only time will tell where Proof collective will be able to write themselves into the history books, but after the oddities reveal they have slipped down on my current power rankings of teams and have even more ground in the future to catch up to Yuga who has helped secure themselves as the top team in NFTs.
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