Metopia NFT Membership Report- Diving into blue-chip NFT collection Doodles, and how governance tweaks can revolutionize the ecosystem.
Introduction
Doodles are a pastel-colored PFP-style NFT collection that launched in March 2021. The following months saw the project establish themselves as a top tier, “blue chip” collection owing to their performance and growth since the initial mint. The Doodles collection is currently ranked 11th on the all-time total volume chart according to Opensea and reached a floor-price high of 26 ETH. The Doodles project is particularly praised for its artwork, community, founders and IRL events.
In this report, we dive deep into the Doodles collection and its community to find out what about the collection that has made the community love it so much and how to remain as a “blue chip” NFT collection.
NFT Assets
The Doodles NFTs are a 10,000 generative collection, with hand drawn 1/1s and super rares that feature unique heads, characters and outfits. The artwork is remarkably unique, from it’s simplistic style to its color palette, it is noticeably identifiable.The Doodles artwork is truly “inspirational” as a collection, as it is one of the most copied NFTs. A “derivative” project known as Squiggles launched in 2022 and landed in hot water with NFT marketplace OpenSea and had art that nearly replicated the original Doodles collection, this eventually led to them being removed entirely off the platform. Squiggles had amassed an army of 200,000 followers on Twitter and 150,000 members on Discord. That example is a true testament of the influence that the Doodles art has in the web 3.0 ecosystem.
Their super rare features include apes, aliens, skeletons, popsicles, ice-creams and more. The initial minting of the collection launched for a price of 0.123 ETH, generating 1,230 ETH from the initial sale. They raised 156k in volume in the secondary sales at a 5% royalty, earning a further 7,8000 ETH with 50% going into the Doodlebank DAO. It has multiple derivative collections including the Space Doodles and the Dooplicator.
The Space Doodles is the first derivative project which were airdropped exclusively to the NFT holders. The collection was a rather interesting project at the time, and differed from the mutations/breeding concepts which were popularized by other top-tier collections such as the BAYC and CryptoKitties.
The Space Doodles collection emerged as the original Doodle inside an animated spacecraft. Each having different traits, levels and rarities that are seperate of the underlying Doodles’, this enabled holders the opportunity to receive a rare NFT, without detracting from the value of their existing Doodle’s rarities.
In May 2022, holders of the original Doodles collection were airdropped a free-to-claim NFT known as the “Dooplicator”, and a month later at NFT.NYC 2022 announced at their launch event that a Dooplicator would be essential to create it’s upcoming collection known as Doodles 2. Additional announcements included the plans to create a Doodles game, a funding round to be led by Venture Capital firm Seven Seven Six, and the appointment of singer-songwriter and entrepreneur Pharrell as a new board member and Chief Brand Officer. With the launch of Space Doodles and Dooplicators and a series of other exciting projects on the horizon, Doodles holders are ecstatic.
Governance
NFT collections have evolved from pure, digital art to acting as a gateway to an exclusive community, as creators want to maximize the utility for their collections. Owning a Doodle is no different, it gives all holders a vote in the Doodlebank DAO as well as the option to create proposals. This enables holders an opportunity to have a voice on where they want the project to head. They have already enacted various community proposals via the Doodlebank DAO including releasing a merchandise collection, vinyl records, bronze toys and more.
The Doodelbank’s purpose was summarized as the following, to “scale our team and begin experimenting to grow the Doodles brand”. It is funded with 50% of all revenue generated from the secondary market and currently has over 2,500 ETH at the time of this writing. Generally a concerning factor for an NFT project is the lack of transparency within the team, funds and roadmaps, Doodlesbank however proves this wrong as they give weekly updates on the size of the fund and every transaction made within the DAO.
The voting procedure is rather simple, members are entitled to have 1 vote for every Doodle owned. There are currently 5,148 unique holders out of the original 10,000 collection so theoretically there are 5,148 unique voices- however there may be some cases where one user holds their Doodles within different wallets, diminishing the concept of a 1-vote 1-NFT system. Despite being the leading governance model of choice today, iit still leaves an unbalanced favor for those who have greater purchasing power than other community members.
Metopia is aiming to solve this problem by creating an incentive governance platform that rewards specific activities and expands NFT capabilities to enable customizations. Most governance systems have a 1-vote 1-NFT system as mentioned above, however the problem is what happens to those that don’t actively participate in proposals and other events? Or what happens when a whale decides to sway the votes from the accumulation of a project? Metopia aims to include all aspects attached to an NFT, this includes traits, rarity, on-chain activities/history and more.
By aggregating the metadata and placing it into an index, we are able to adjust voting weights depending on the holder’s activity. An example is that an “inactive holder” may have their voting weight adjusted to 0.9 as opposed to the standard 1. Under the current system, a holder with 200 NFTs for example is able to sway community votes by a large margin, so depending on the team, they may decide to adjust that holder’s voting weight by 0.8 per NFT to help dilute the votes and to not completely disregard it.
By collating multiple reference points, users are encouraged to participate in engaging actively in the community, as the number one problem for DAOs is the lack of participation. We believe that we are able to help strengthen communities by creating a fairer system.
Utility
Utility for NFTs have become an essential perk for most communities. In addition to the plans to create a Doodles game, holders of the collection also have access to all IRL events. Having already held four events over the course of 2022 and most recently at NFT.NYC, they have demonstrated an exceptional ability to deliver on empowering their community.
Market Performance History
The project publicly released their whitelist on the 17th of March, and to the public the following day for a mint price of 0.123 ETH — a very expensive price during that period. Doodles sold out quickly, due to its renowned marketing strategies, the hype around the team as well as the art. The public sale created many issues on the Ethereum blockchain as gas fees skyrocketed, with reports of users paying between 3–5 ETH in transaction fees to mint their quote of five Doodles. This meant that most minters paid close to 1 ETH per transaction on top of their mint price of 0.123 ETH.
As of June 29, the floor price sits at 13.6 ETH. Considering the entire world market performance ranging from equities to cryptocurrency over the last few months, Doodles remains to be a gem in the current market condition, outpacing other top NFT collections. In such markets, an outstanding project can garner all the market’s attention that pushes its value further.
Conclusion
There is still a lot of hype surrounding Doodles as it has established itself as one of the most reputable projects in the form of community governance, IRL events, utilities alongside two airdrops and a very transparent DAO. There could be some tweaks to the governance system as mentioned earlier, to create an incentive layer which may help maintain activity in the community if the markets continue to decline. However, there is a universal consensus that it is a blue chip collection as it has proven its performance despite the dismal downturn of the market in recent months. The team behind Doodles have shown that they are eager to connect web 2.0 and web 3.0, creating a tight-knit, loyal community while simultaneously promoting the product. The future is bright for Doodles, and we are excited to see where the project will go.
