bizon

The BIG thing no one is talking about with @yugalabs at hinting their own marketplace: What happens to the future of BAYC, MAYC, and BAKC ecosystem when royalties are optional? I see two possible paths forward ➡️ ————————— ROYALTIES = 0️⃣ BAYC/MAYC/BAKC (which has been Yuga’s bread and butter) will bring minimal revenue to the company going forward because they can be traded on Opensea with optional royalties. This puts @yugalabs in a bind: should they focus their attention on the collections that do bring revenue (HV-MTL, otherdeeds, LoTM)? Or continue to build out utility for the OG membership collection that doesn’t bring any revenue? Based purely on incentives alone, it would make sense that Yuga naturally focuses more on the revenue generating ones. But that wouldn’t make their OG bored and mutant ape collectors happy (since utility is something that’s expected) - and pissing off your holder base is not good. So what should Yuga do? ————————— TWO PATHS FORWARD: 1) Migrate BAYC/MAYC/BAKC to a new collection Just like Yuga did with Otherdeeds (moving those NFTs from the old contract to the new ”Otherdeeds expanded” contract), they can migrate BAYC/MAYC collections to a new contract. For otherdeeds to otherdeeds expanded, the incentive to burn was you get Vessel NFTs from their upcoming LoTM game - and Yuga continues to collect full royalties on Otherdeeds sales. Yuga can offer a similar incentive here, where migrating your bored or mutant ape gets you access to something new, and the new NFTs can enforce royalties and only be traded in their own marketplace, not Opensea. There are trade offs for doing this of course (fragmenting the collection, increase of scam sites that offer fake migration), but it does keep royalty revenue in tact, which keeps incentives aligned for yuga to keep building for its holders. The other option is to embrace 0 royalties like Punks. 2) (attempt to) graduate BAYC/MAYC to punk status Punks signal something about you. Punks are a flex. They are art. They have no tangible utility. They also have 0 royalties. Despite this, the Punks floor has been fairly stable, still sitting around $100K USD deep in a bear, while the bored ape floor is now below $50K USD. When you add utility to NFTs, you make the token about math and market functions, vs the art itself. “Can I buy before a big announcement and sell before the news comes out?” “Staking yields me X dollars so at Y price, buying this NFT makes sense” All of that, as we are learning, tends to devalue the historical provenance of the NFT and makes it all about: what is coming next? Can I make money off this? Could royalties going to 0 be the perfect time to end utility for BAYC/MAYC and help them graduate to Punk (read: art) status? Despite a brutal bear, NFT art has maintained its value and bucks the downward price trend many PFP projects are currently in. The next 6 months will be interesting. How do you think Yuga plays it?