Moonbirds are soaring; NFT collection analysis

Introduction

The Moonbird launch was historic. Never before have we seen jpeg volume so rampant. This collection of 10,000 NFT owls launched on April 16th, 2022 and has since outpaced any other collection in terms of post-launch volume and floor price velocity.

Let’s put numbers around this. Moonbirds minted at 2.5 ETH, and within 24 hours saw 65.2K ETH ($200M) in trading volume and a floor price of 16.26 ETH. Concretely, if you were one of the chosen ones to mint a Moonbird for ~$7,700, you could have sold it 24 hours later for a ~$42,300 profit. Following, if you want to feel more of a burn, the current floor price is now 27.1 ETH ($84,000).

How did we miss out on the mint? Well, it was exclusive and part of the Proof Collective membership.

Some background — Kevin Rose, Justin Mezzel, and Ryan Carson are crypto veterans who run a membership-club type NFT project called Proof Collective. Per the website, “Membership includes access to our private Discord, early access to the PROOF podcast, in-person events, and other collaborations created exclusively for PROOF Collective members.”

Moonbirds was one of those project collaborations; intended to be the official profile picture (pfp) of the Proof Collective. Of the 10,000 Moonbirds total: 7,875 were allocated to those who won a Proof Collective membership raffle; 2,000 for Proof Collective members; 125 for distribution by the Moonbirds team. Link to OpenSea here: https://opensea.io/collection/proof-collective

Simply, the membership scheme created the hype, and a perfect storm for a successful launch. And now, we are all priced out of both the Proof Collective membership club and Moonbirds. Proof Collective membership has risen from 5.5 ETH at the end of December (project was launched on December 11th) to a current price of 105.5 ETH. Wild.

What has surprised me, is that the Moonbird price has continued to soar. I’ve been obsessively refreshing the OpenSea collection page, and somehow, there hasn’t been a mass panic sell: https://opensea.io/collection/proof-moonbirds.

And tied into this week-long Moonbird obsession, I’ve run some numbers. This report is not meant to be comprehensive; I’ve just been interested in the collection so I made a few graphs.

Data and analysis

Related to the data and this analysis, the analysis was run on the morning of April 21st, when the floor price was 27.1. The floor price is now 28 ETH. Here are the collection metrics at this exact moment:

Trading volume and floor price

Ok, let’s get into it. The graph below shows Moonbird’s trading volume and floor price in the first few days after launch.

And just for fun, let’s run the same graph for Proof Collective membership NFT.

Moonbirds mint vs. March/April collections

The table below compares the Moonbird mint to collections minted between March 15th and April 18th. There were two reasons I was interested in these numbers: one, I wanted to see — for my own eyes — in rainbow colors, how crazy this price surge has been. And two, I was curious about mint metrics related to “blue chip buyers”. Here, I define “blue chip buyers” as any account that at any point in time held a Punk, BAYC, MAYC, or Azuki.

What I found interesting is that proportionally, MoonBirds weren’t a huge outlier with the blue-chip metrics. In fact, Arcade Land, First Day Out, and Kiwami Genesis had more high-profile holders.

Moonbirds mint vs. Azuki mint

Azuki’s quick rise to blue-chip may be the only other comparable collection, but as we can see by the graph below, Azuki’s trading volume doesn’t even come close to MoonBird’s.

Moonbird trades

Of course, we know that everyone who minted an owl has made money. But what about the traders; the people who are in it to flip? Well, no surprise, the traders made money. The metrics below only include single items trades.

Metrics per trade:

• Avg profit: 5.53 ETH ($~17,000)
• Avg time to sell: 22 hours

Metrics per trader (difference being these are address-level metrics):

• Avg number of Moonbirds bought and sold: 1.5 owls
• Avg profit: 8.31 ETH (~$25,600 USD)
• Avg time to sell 25 hours

Top traders

Top trade

It isn’t clear that the top trade is actually the top trade, but thought it was worth linking: https://opensea.io/assets/0x23581767a106ae21c074b2276d25e5c3e136a68b/4190

The owl below was “purchased” for 0.2 ETH and sold for 80 ETH. While this owl does look rare, there is definitely some background deal we’re not privy to.

Proof Collective vs. Moonbird holders

One of the big questions I had after understanding the membership structure was how many of the Proof Collective members held their Moonbirds. In order to get this metric, I compared current holders of the Proof Collective membership club with Moonbird holders.

The findings were interesting. There are currently 934 unique addresses holding a Proof Collective NFT. And…

92% of the Proof Collective NFT hold at least one Moonbird.

Further, 46% (431/934) of Proof Collection holders kept both the birds they were allocated. 16% (149/934) of the holders own 1 owl, 46% (431/934) own 2 owls, and 12% (116/934) own 3 owls.

It is safe to say that aping into the membership during its early days has more than paid for itself, and also that the community is bought in. The 92% “diamond wings” (members still holding) metric is a strong one.

Outro

Birds nesting, diamond wings, hoot hoot — who knows what the future of Moonbirds and Proof Collection will hold. I’ve been thinking a lot about the value of Mutants (33.3 ETH) vs. Azuki (24.5 ETH) vs. Moonbirds (27.1 ETH) because at this moment all those projects seem somewhat neck and neck in terms of status and pricing. But when it comes down to it, it is hard to say who is going to win out in the long-run.

If you’re interested in learning more about this project, there has been a lot of Moonbird content dropped this past week. Podcasts I’ve listened to are:

• Bankless: Podcast Link
• Proof: Podcast Link

On a final note, Dune continues to be the real MVP. It still blows my mind that one can simply query for on-chain answers. Here is the Github link that contains all the queries used in this analysis: https://github.com/seidmutant/moonbird-analysis

If you have any follow up questions or want to commiserate about missing out on Moonbirds, hit me up on Twitter @seidtweets.