Needle in a haystack: Spotting NFTs

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Coinmonks

6 min readSep 7, 2021

Released in 2017, CryptoKitties was one of the earliest experiments with NFTs. They’re the output of code that randomizes the Kitties appearances, and input for future generations of kitties. It proved the viability of an NFT market.

Today Investors are spending tens of millions of dollars on digital art. You will be familiar with the idea that scarce assets and resources tend to have value. Provable scarcity, immutability, and programmability are just a few areas from which NFTs derive their value.

OpenSea, the largest marketplace for nonfungible tokens recorded a $3.4 billion transaction volume in August — more than 10 times the number in July, according to Dune Analytics.

NFTs is a rapidly growing market. The data shows unprecedented interest in nonfungible tokens — Why? because Humans are status-seeking creatures, always looking for new ways to elevate ourselves above the pack.

The main advantage of NFTs is to represent and authenticate ownership of a unique asset in the blockchain. The record cannot be modified — This one-of-a-kind nature of NFTs allows assets to be considered valuable. David Gerard, the author of Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain, said he saw NFTs as buying “official collectibles”, similar to trading cards.

#Spotting NFTs:

With millions of NFTs in circulation and hundreds of new NFT projects launching each week, it becomes difficult to spot good NFT projects or easy to lose attention on the best NFT projects. Here is a compilation of projects which are undervalued but I believe have strong fundamentals (based on community support, developers (or creators) ongoing focus on the product and Art).

#1 TigerGuild

Much of the NFTs are all part of a larger opportunity: the Metaverse. As conceptualized in books and movies beginning in the 1990s, the Metaverse is the virtual alternative to our physical universe and maybe the next version of the internet. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, recently said the social network would pivot to becoming a “metaverse company”.

For years, technologists have been predicting the rise of the “metaverse,” an online digital world where users will have a separate identity from their offline selves. 3D NFTs can be seen as one-step closure to adopting the next version of the internet.

Unlike regular NFT collectibles, the 3D collection allows some degree of interactivity since it can be placed in any shared 3D space, including virtual and augmented reality apps, games, animations, and films. TigerGuild is a bet on this 3D NFT space.

Creating 3D art takes a great deal of skill: Working in 3D adds a level of depth and realism that’s extremely hard to capture when working in 2D and developers at Tiger Guild have done an amazing job to achieve the result.

Each Tiger 3D NFT is algorithmically generated from a blend of over 350 properties/traits, resulting in each minter receiving a completely unique and distinct 3D model of their Tiger. This feat is achieved through a rarity algorithm developed by the Tigers Guild team.

#2 Alto City

Today, artists are bringing ideas and methods from a long tradition of creative coding to the field of NFTs, and it feels like a good fit. Art made with code is being traded on exchanges made with code. While galleries might worry over how to sell generative work like software, prints, or something else — the vocabulary of NFTs offers a simple solution: collectors don’t buy the system but a token that represents it.

Alto city is a bet on this ‘digital art form’. Alto city is a collection of 15 900 generative art NFTs on Ethereum Blockchain. Each NFT represents a map of one of the world’s cities in artistic form.

The artistic part of this project took a bit more than 2 full years. It is the first NFT project that comes with a set of physical products that will sell and pay royalties to NFT owners.

This unique concept revolves around the idea that NFT collectors can feel a deeper sense of connection with the brand, which will translate into increased customer loyalty.

#3 Soccer Doge

While a collectible has no intrinsic value from a financial perspective, it may have some intrinsic value given the buyer’s personal feeling about the item, which is why rule number one for any casual collector is to buy things you actually like.

Why I like Soccer Doge — Unlike most NFT projects, Soccer Doge creators did not copy BAYC to adopt laser eyes or golden fur or any other sort of BAYC traits — An entire unique collection. Soccer Doge Club was launched as a collection of 10,000 unique NFTs generated by an algorithm on the ETH blockchain in July 2021.

#Summary:

Metaverse enthusiasts believe that our digital identities will eventually become just as meaningful as our offline selves — Instead of putting art on the walls of our homes, they predict, we’ll put NFTs in our virtual Zoom backgrounds.

With millions of NFTs in circulation and hundreds of new NFT projects launching each month, it has become impossible to spot a good NFT. It’s like finding a Needle in a haystack. The author attempts to uncover some of the undervalued NFT projects that have strong fundamentals (based on community support, developers (or creators) ongoing focus on the product, and Art).

PS: While a collectable has no intrinsic value from a financial perspective, it may have some intrinsic value given the buyer’s personal feeling about the item, which is why rule number one for any casual collector is to buy things you actually like.

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