Hive Punks come to Hive !

For the best part of the last six months I have been focused on selling my photography NFTs on ETH and trading ETH NFTs. So I was super excited when I saw this Punks on Hive (https://punks.usehive.com/) project launch. Thanks to @themarkymark for the effort he has put into this project; and cool to see they are unique punks not just clones of the original Lava labs ones. The fact that these sold out so quickly shows I am not the only one bullish on them. These are the OG avatar NFTs for Hive. They will go down in hive history.

I have always thought the potential for NFTs is massive on Hive but it has been held back by lack of serious investors willing to develop a high value market. I think the fact one has to use SWAP.HIVE and the quazi decentralised Hive Engine are also issues that hold us back. This has led me personally to have to still use ETH platforms for my sale of work as that is simply where the majority of high net worth collectors are (the top prices on NFTShowroom or Lensy just don't compare with ETH sales). But lets be honest ETH gas is horrific and bad for the environment; so it would be better for the world if the markets shifted over to POS or DPOS chains.

This brings me back to hive punks. I am super bullish on hive punks as I think the broader crypto NFT userbase really understand 10k mint avatar projects and this is the crack in the door to onboard them to Hive. If we can get seamless user experience happening here without any gas it could be a breakthrough. I ended up picking up 101 of them when I saw the mint was going to sell out yesterday. Did not do so well in the rarity luckydip but have quite a few nice ones and will be trying some out as my avatar to see which one feels right. Love how easy it is to set it as an avatar though the site itself.

Few thoughts on where I think this needs to go having spend a lot of time on other NFT platforms.

• Be cool to get a blue tick or something similar on your avatar if you verifiably own the NFT (this is the direction twitter is going)

• The marketplace needs a fair bit of work in terms of being able to sort by parameters (price being the most urgent as currently only by rarity and hard to determine the floor price) but also sub restrict view to certain traits. I think @themarkymark is aware of this and probably felt that he had more time to update the site before they all sold out. Nice problem to have however.

• I think the 10% market fee is a major issue. 10% is ok for a virgin mint but as a ongoing transactional tax its too high. Ongoing fee/royalty beyond 2-4% kills projects. There is a lot of evidence for that on other platforms. It simply kills liquidity; and liquidity is the lifeblood of any market, it is basic economic theory that tariffs kill volumes. Would Bitcoin have ever taken off if you had to pay 10% fee for every transaction? People won't come from other chains if they see such high fees. The original ETH punks have no fees on their internal market,Opensea takes 2.5%, new generation fully decentralised platforms like Tux.art are a combination of fully on chain and IPFS (even for the platform webpage) and have 0% fee (essentially peer to peer sales). These are the numbers the existing industry is used to. I accept that for now sales prices are very low compared to ETH NFT sales so perhaps a cap or sliding scale based on price could also work in the interim if 10% is needed to fund the platform short term).

• The reliance on swap.hive and its 1% conversion fee will become a limiting factor stopping prices rises into very high value territory (sell a punk for $500,000 and 1% conversion fee, each way from hive to swap.hive and back, starts to look terrible compared to 200$ in ETH gas (let alone the $50k market fee with it at 10%). This will cap how high these prices can go IMO. I understand LEO does this for less; not sure what liquidity limits there are via Leo.

• Would love to see the ability to set prices in HBD; this would be a game changer as an NFT market IMO. Also an interface where people can just bid in Hive or HBD and the Hive.swap transactions take place in the background. Would cut out one step which is complicated for new entrants. The more seamless the better.

• Cross chain swaps on the market place would be amazing. Existing NFT whales could log in with ETH/SOL/WAX/EOS/etc wallet and buy a hive punk. This brings in fresh equity and removes any barrier to entry for a massive existing bunch of traders. Pricing Punks in HBD would also decouple them from the volatility of the hive price and make investors more comfortable IMO.

Anyway a few ideas to think about and in no way intended to diminish the work @themarkymark has put into this epic project. I would love to see crypto twitter shift to Hive. It pains me that I have to spend so much time on Twitter to interact with the main crypto NFT community as part of my photography NFT business. Having native on chain avatars on Hive is a big step forward towards a truly decentralised Web 3.

LFG

Edit to add some clarification of the point above about fees. You can't compare 10k generative avatar projects (like punks/apes) to fees on dedicated art platforms that allow users to mint their own 1/1 art (like MakersPlace/Foundation/SuperRare/KnownOrigion/etc, NFTshowroom being the Hive equivalent). To do so misunderstands the whole NFT market as 1/1 art secondary sale fees are predominantly royality that goes to the original artist who supplied the art not to the platform. The platform takes its main revenue from the initial (primary) sale. This does not represent the existing model with respect to successful 10k generative avatar projects, you need to look at the avatar projects themselves for existing precedents. The original ETH Punks have zero fees for example on sale. This allowed people to flip without the restrictions of fees and was critical in the early days in developing liquidity (they use their own market platform). They monetised the punks after first building a successful community, and did this via the early access program which let punk owners exclusively mint Meebits (basically leveraging the brand into another project).

A more recent example is Board Apes (BAYC) that launched into a much more developed market using existing platform rather than building their own. They charge collectors 2.5% royality, add this to the Opensea market fee (of 2.5%), so a total of 5% (split between BAYC and Opensea). These are the magnitude of numbers we should be looking to target long term for generative avatar projects IMO. I understand this might have to be a phased approach of Hive Punks as the initial mint price was very low (so initial revenue to build a business around is low) and subsequent trading fees will be low (even at 10%) until punks appreciate significantly from the 20 hive mint level.