It’s (Nearly) Banner Time.
Why we believe NFT Banners are primed for lift off, and what we’re doing about it.
The NFT market is currently dominated by Profile Pictures (PFPs), and rightly so.
They are the personalized character, the avatar, and the self representation of our digital identities. They signal to the digital world how we want to be perceived both from a visual level and from a status level.
Amazing communities have formed around PFP projects, and will continue to do so.
But what is the next evolution of NFTs within digital identity?
What is the next opportunity to be an early collector in a movement that is unsaturated, under-appreciated, and untapped?
We are convinced that the answer is NFT Profile Banners (PFBs).
This post is about why.
Now is a good time to mention two very important disclaimers. Number one is that nothing written here should ever be considered financial advice. This is just our perspective that we are sharing for educational and entertainment purposes. Number two is that we are heavily invested in (and therefore severely biased towards) a banner project called PunkScapes. You’ll see them referenced here in this post, and many, many more times on our Twitter feed. Do your own research.
Now that we have that out of the way….here are the themes that have us bullish on banners.
Digital Identity 101
Let’s strip it down to its cultural and practical basics.
There are only two ways to showcase your digital identity on the majority of mainstream social platforms: your profile photo and your background/cover photo (banner).
If the PFP represents the individual, the PFB represents the environment, the context, and the home setting for that individual. And those things signal a lot about a person or an organization’s digital identity.
The ability to use a PFB to tell a story or set a theme is where we see the underlying Demand coming from for Banner collections.
In addition to the visual use, PFB collections can have all the same utility cases and community benefits as PFPs.
Social Real Estate
On platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, and even OpenSea, your cover photo dominates the visual area, representing over 80% of a profile’s digital identity real estate.
It seems fair to us to say that this larger, commanding space is deserving of more care and attention than it currently gets in most profiles — both from individuals and from brands.
Mainstream Use Potential
This is a big one.
If you’re a degen, you have no problem with using a Mutant or a Cat or a DickButt or any other number of NFTs as your profile photo on Twitter.
But Steve, the 43-year-old VP of an Austin-based FinTech company doesn’t feel comfortable using those types of PFPs on LinkedIn, or anywhere else where his professional contacts may be able to find him.
Steve really wants everyone to recognize him at SXSW, so he needs to keep his IRL portrait as his profile photo. But what Steve really wants to do is signal his knowledge of Web3 and show his younger colleagues that he knows how to successfully use MetaMask. So what does he do?
Perhaps he follows the lead of Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke and opts for a PunkScape Banner….
Under Represented
How many PFP collections are there? It’s a very difficult question to answer. It’s safe to say there are thousands. Possibly even tens of thousands. And new collections are launching every day, competing for the same pool of capital and the same profile picture.
Now take a wild guess how many PFB collections there are.
500?
200?
100?
Nope. According to PFB data aggregator YOTB.io (Year of the Banner), there are just 23 PFB collections discoverable in the world right now.
Twenty three.
With so few PFB collections in existence, new collectors and investors in the Banner movement have fewer places to allocate their capital.
Increased Demand x Extremely Limited Supply = Good News for Hodlers
The Current PFB Landscape + Grails
According to YOTB, there are just 23 PFB collections discoverable in the world right now. Of them:
- A total of 16 PFB projects were created before the end of 2021
- Just 6 have a supply of 5k or more
- Only 5 have traded more than 250 ETH since their inception
There are just 2 PFB collections that currently check all the boxes above, giving them OG Grail Banner status in our books:
PunkScapes
https://punkscape.xyz/
https://opensea.io/collection/punkscapes
https://twitter.com/PunkScape
10k PFB Collection — Launched September 2021
Current Floor: 0.179ETH
Midnight Breeze by DutchTide
https://www.midnightbreeze.io/ https://opensea.io/collection/midnightbreeze
https://twitter.com/dutchtide
7k PFB Collection — Launched December 2021
Current Floor: 0.50ETH
PFP / PFB Price Disparity
The two Grail PFB collections mentioned above represent the best of the best in the PFB space, and yet Midnight Breeze currently sells for 226x less than BAYC, and PunkScape sells for 329x less than CryptoPunks.
We don’t believe that Grail PFBs deserve to be valued equally to Grail PFPs, but these multiples seem excessive.
An eventual market landscape in which Grail PFBs fetch ~10% of the value of equivalent Grail PFPs seems far more reasonable, in our opinion.
In Summary
More and more NFT collectors and investors are starting to realize that there is a much broader world to explore outside of self portraits.
The cultural relevance, mainstream usage potential, and current limited supply of PFB collections has us convinced that NFT Banners will see a sharp rise in adoption and eventually close the vast valuation gap with popular PFP collections.
