Welcome back to another Future Friday post, where I cover some of the most interesting upcoming projects in the cryptosphere, particularly NFTs.
If you read my last post regarding the current state of NFTs, you know that ETH gas fees are absolutely killing the market. Sure, back in August we had some pretty insane gas prices during gas wars, but they’d always settle back down at a reasonable floor, which is when most of us would start playing the market. However, the “floor” in recent weeks has almost never dropped below $100 and is usually $150–200 right now, which is a huge risk for those looking to gamble on fresh mints and a massive impediment for projects whose floors are under 1 ETH.
At this point, we’re seeing a massive surge towards Solana as an NFT platform, with many projects popping off after a slow October and new project mints making massive multiples in relatively short times. Therefore, today’s post will be largely dedicated towards upcoming Solana projects. Fees on Solana are well under $1 and transactions are super fast, meaning speculators can have a field day chasing mints and grinding white lists. Furthermore, fewer players in the SOL ecosystem means that quality projects are easier to spot, and I hope to highlight potential quality projects today in this post.
First things first: If you have never used Solana before, first you’re going to need a wallet. Phantom is your only good choice. It’s a browser wallet very similar to MetaMask with some nifty additional features. Download that for Firefox or Brave, and then go through the steps to create a wallet. Then of course you should know the drill — just make sure you have SOL in your wallet and you’re good to go!
From here, you’ll want to note that there are several SOL NFT marketplaces. The top 2 I can recommend are MagicEden and Solanart. There are many others, but these are the highest volume marketplaces. Now that you have your wallet and your marketplace, the last resource you’ll want is Step. Step is “the front page of Solana” and will show you the balances of all your Solana tokens, all of your NFTs, various staking pools and rewards, and more. It’s a fantastic service and is criminally underrated, and I really wish that ETH had something similar to Step (if you like it as much as I do, you can pick up their token $STEP on both centralized and decentralized exchanges).
Now that we’ve got our wallets filled with SOL, let’s take a look at some upcoming projects. For what it’s worth, it’s important to note that the SOL NFT ecosystem is still nascent and often filled with ETH copycats, derivatives, and generally unoriginal projects. I asked everybody I knew and dove deep into newsletters and upcoming mint lists to find the following projects, and this does not amount to financial advice or endorsements of these projects. I am simply keeping my eye on these and will likely participate in at least a couple of these.
NYAN HEROES
Probably the largest and most anticipated upcoming SOL mint that I could find, Nyan Heroes is an upcoming project that mints on 8 November at 18:00 UTC. Nyan Heroes are cat-driven giant robots that can be battled against each other in their upcoming blockchain NFT game, where players can earn rewards such as their proprietary token $CTNP which can be earned in-game and spent on upgrades to your Nyan Heroes or just sold on the open market for a cryptocurrency of your choice.
Nyan Heroes has partnered with Metaplex Studios and Solana Labs to help fund the development of their game, which is a pretty big partnership considering the smaller size of the Solana NFT ecosystem. Furthermore, with nearly 30k followers on their Twitter they are one of the most watched NFT projects on Solana right now.
However, it’s important to note that the mint price for this project is 3 SOL (currently about $750) making it one of the most expensive mints on the market right now, even if you include ETH NFT projects. Will this be worth it? In current market conditions, my recommendation is to mint no more than a small number (if you can afford it) and wait to see how the price reacts post-drop. Many Solana projects are bleeding heavily right now, but some are skyrocketing, meaning good execution and strong community are essential for the project’s success. I will have my eye on this project and am curious to see how it unfolds.
SOLSEATS
SolSeats might seem odd at first — it’s just a bunch of chairs, right? How could this possibly be an interesting project? Well, for starters it qualifies as a “fair launch” in that there is no pre-mint nor any whitelist to get on, so it’s a first-come, first-served mint (0.69 SOL) coming up on 17 November @ 22:22 UTC. That being said, it’s important to note that FCFS launches can be botted and spammed, so it’s important to show up ready once the project drops. However, given the fact that there are 3069 seats up for grabs and only 1 per TX, you’ll likely have at least a few minutes to grab a seat before it sells out.
Each Seat acts as a token to access the community’s project space, where members can build new projects together and share in a portion of the profits. Additionally, holders will gain exclusive access to physical real-world merchandise which includes unique actual seats that resemble unique SolSeat NFTs. 69 lucky buyers will qualify for the seats (or a 1 SOL reward if you choose not to have the seat shipped to you) and another 50 will qualify for additional SolSeat merchandise (or 0.25 SOL instead).
SolSeats is certainly a unique take on NFT art, and considering the lack of originality of many SOL projects I think that SolSeats (if executed correctly) stands a chance at creating a unique community where everyone can grab a seat at “The Table” and collaborate together on any Solana project that strikes their fancy.
You can find their website here, and follow them on Twitter here.
SOLGODS
SOLgods is a recently launched project that is easily one of the most unique profile picture (PFP) NFT projects I’ve ever seen, including those on Ethereum. The artwork is inspired by 20th century artist Giorgio de Chirico’s “mannequins” and is backed by an incredibly high-quality lore and one of the most robust Discord communities I’ve ever seen.
A generative collection of 6666 “gods,” SOLgods launched on 28 October and has steadily been climbing the charts to become one of the top projects on the Solana blockchain in just one week. So far, over 10k SOL has been transacted between their primary markets of MagicEden and Alpha.art and is rapidly growing. The Discord community is extremely active, particularly due to the “enigma” puzzles that have members scrambling over the project’s website, Twitter feed, and detailed clues in the art to decipher the enigma for prizes — the first of which was a unique 1/1 NFT for the first 50 people to solve the puzzle.
Furthermore, the royalties from the project are being reinvested (not airdropped) back into the community to develop new content based on the SOLgods lore and universe, so ambitious creators and artists are able to tap into the community’s resources to develop new and/or derivative works using the community’s war chest.
However, it must be noted that it has become common practice (especially in the SOL ecosystem) to collect the royalties from each sale and give back to the community. This can be somewhat problematic, as this could technically classify the project as a security and therefore would be susceptible to additional regulation in the USA. Therefore, SOLgods has made it clear that the funds will not be given directly back to the community, but instead will be re-invested to create additional content and enhanced experiences for holders of SOLgods.
That being said, it’s unclear how this mechanic will affect SOLgods’ listing on the American FTX NFT marketplace as time goes on, but for now the project is available to American consumers via a centralized marketplace. However, even without the American marketplace this project has raked in incredible volume and is featured on numerous front pages of various SOL marketplaces. This is one project you absolutely don’t want to miss out on. The current floor for SOLgods is 1.45 SOL (approximately $340), but will likely not stay there for long.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
There are numerous other Solana NFT drops coming up in the month of November, however I want to make sure I don’t write an entire novel on the subject. Therefore, below I will list several projects that caught my eye that may be worth your attention. The criteria I use to determine if a project has merit include the following points:
- Unique Art: First and foremost, the project must have unique art. Solana has been plagued with copycats of ETH projects, derivatives of other projects, and generally uninteresting concepts. There are hundreds of monkey/ape-themed projects on Solana, a plethora of “Solana [insert animal here] Business” profile pictures, and projects that are literally copy-pasted from Ethereum without being associated with the originals. Therefore I look for unique, never-before-seen artwork and storytelling in projects I invest in.
- Social Media: If the project doesn’t have a following online, it will be difficult to market itself and grow. Of course, projects can become sleeper hits via word-of-mouth, but that is highly unlikely unless the project is truly special.
- Mint Price: If the mint price is more than 1 SOL, the project better have a very strong community and high-quality art. Projects on SOL flop more often than succeed, so the bar is very high for projects asking for a high mint price.
- Strategic Goals: If the project does not have long-term vision, the art better be meme-worthy. “Developing a video game” does not qualify as a long-term goal, as 99% of these projects will fail. Instead, ask yourself “how will this community continue to thrive after the price has pumped and everyone is already well aware of the project?” Those with good answers to this question will likely have far more longevity than those that don’t.
Without further adieu, here are some of the upcoming projects, listed in no particular order, and I have no affiliation with any of these projects. Do your own research and never spend more than you’re willing to lose.
- 00RR0R: Free mint today on 5 November @ 17:00 UTC. Website — Twitter. Low risk, no harm in minting something for free!
- Element4ls: An NFT that is working on a game (yes, I just warned you against this, but this seems to be on the higher-quality side). Mint (0.5 SOL) is tomorrow, 6 November @ 17:00 UTC. Website — Twitter.
- SolWarriors: Mint (1.0 SOL) is tomorrow, 6 November @ 19:00 UTC. Website — Twitter.
- Fractality: Mint (0.33 SOL) is tomorrow, 6 November @ 22:00 UTC. Website — Twitter.
- GnomieZ: Mint (0.22 SOL) is Sunday, 7 November @ 23:30 UTC. Website — Twitter.
If you want to browse dozens more of upcoming drops, check out the following links:
- HowRare — a website for checking NFT rarity.
- SolAnalysis — a website for analyzing SOL NFT transactions and data.
That’s it for this Future Friday post! If you have any suggestions for upcoming projects, feel free to send me a message on Twitter or find me on Discord (Zomboy#2590). Until next time!
