The long-awaited day has finally arrived, after months of delays, the y00ts NFT artwork reveal is finally here, and it has been the talk of the NFT community on Twitter over the weekend.
This reveal has sparked debates on many different topics, some being ones we’ve already seen, such as the royalties’ debate, and others being new such as why all the delays to just release such similar art. Let’s look at what it means for not only y00ts and the team moving forward but also the whole Solana ecosystem.
Even though the y00ts have been all over our Twitter timeline, and the art has seemed to be generally well received, the price action has shown a different story.
The floor price for the revealed y00ts has been all over the place since burning the t00bs has started, when the reveal first started the revealed y00ts price had bounced around from 75 sol to 95 sol and now at the time of writing is down to 67 sol. Also, in what appears to be a downward trajectory, the t00bs were near 130 SOL before the reveal started, and are now down to 100 SOL, where they have found decent support.
Even though many like to believe that floor price does not matter to projects, and should not matter to holders, it is a good indicator of price discovery for overall market sentiment, which is discouraging to see for a project that had so much hype and momentum at the time of launch.
The real question here is – What happened? What has caused this negative price action?
After judging community sentiment from holders and non-holders alike on twitter and in the discord, it seems a few misses and poorly set expectations by Frank are likely leading to this price action. The primary negative feedback is tied to the wishy-washiness of royalty’s, the lack of rarity in the y00ts outside of the 1/1s and missed expectations regarding the art itself after the lengthy delay.
Royalties
After being one of the leading voices of the NFT community in support of Magic Eden’s switch to zero royalties and fees and being the first major project to switch both of their collections to 0% royalties until there was a more enforceable way to make sure royalties were paid, Frank and the team decided to go back on their stance and impose a 3.33% royalty on revealed y00ts, while leaving t00bs at 0%.
Even though Frank has said that there will be no consequences for trading royalty free, this is still a miss to the community for not having enough confidence in your decisions to stand by them.
y00ts Rarities
Another issue that the project has ran into is the semi-flat rarity structure. While I don’t personally see an issue with it and enjoy that it directs the community to buy based on what they find aesthetically pleasing instead of a predetermined rarity, this has taken away from NFT degens being able to play the rarity lotto that they ever-so love that has helped propel similar collections such as Renga in the past.
There are 40 1/1s on the collection, but besides those, the traits are all evenly distributed. Only a few traits are carrying a premium. Right now, just the Pyrite Crown, which crowns always carry a premium, and the McY00ts Polo are commanding a premium nearly 2x the floor. The next rarest trait, the Banana Hazmat, is about 50 percent over the floor.
Frank has stated he wants aesthetics to guide pricing, but the real issue is that the gambler in all of us loves rare lotto’s and that is one reason we are not seeing an increase in price in the roughly 4500 unburned t00bs that are left.
Art Expectations
This has been one of the biggest contention points for the project to date, is the expectations that have been laid out by Frank. The issue lies in the tweet posted by frank roughly a month ago that shows them deleting a file of the artwork and how that has been misinterpreted by the community. While this was only one file of the artwork, most people’s expectations where that they had scrapped all the y00ts artwork and not just one file of it.
While there are some noticeable differences in the original art compared to the new art that was released, most people do not feel like it was enough to justify such a major delay. A major sentiment that has been expressed is that if the reveal had been right after mint and the art had been released that this art would have been great for the market, but the issue is that the art just quite didn’t live up to the two months of hype and suspense.
Before falling into the group think that the art had not evolved over time, make sure to check out this video of the full documentation of all the art decisions made behind the scenes.
So, what does this mean for y00ts and the Solana ecosystem moving forward? Well, it depends on your faith in Frank and the rest of the team to be able to deliver moving forward. If there is one thing that we have seen over the course of the last year is that Frank is amazing at getting eyes on his projects, which the attention space of the NFT market is so small, being able to keep eyes on you is one of the most important things of the ecosystem. While there is assumed to be a ton of utility in the works for holders, most have been left unannounced at this time.
But from what we’ve seen it will only take one ground-breaking announcement from Frank to be able to erase all this recent FUD and send the projects back to its place as the top projects in Solana. While we are still very early in what Frank and y00ts will deliver, it will be exciting to see where the project ends up, and this is a team that has shown they are able to deliver.
At the current time staking has not gone live for holders, and the staking rewards have yet to be revealed, I would say we will see a similar structure to how the Moonbirds have done their nesting, and it will be great to see the value that Frank will be able to deliver to his holders.
