Sold out in minutes—How Reddit Avatars can be a huge success while most other projects on OpenSea face all-time lows.

Spent a lot of effort writing this up, so please have a read if these collectible little dudes and their recent success have at all piqued your interest or raised your eyebrows.

———————————

I bought my first avatar because I thought it looked cool and I like Tyler Foust’s artwork. Never had an NFT before (save for Uniswap liquidity positions), and I never thought it’d be worth much. Fast forward to today, where it’s worth at least 20x what I paid for it, and I find myself buying several avatars on mint to mix-and-match different features and attributes with my beloved rainbow foustling. How did this happen? Let me tell you.

These NFTs are practical in a way 99% of NFTs aren’t. I know that sounds stupid, but keep with me. I don’t mean are functional or entitle you to something (yet), I mean that in the sense that they are made specifically for Reddit; I and 430 million others are already on Reddit all the time; all users, including myself, naturally see my avatar whenever I interact with the site; and it just works within the Reddit system. The integration into normal Reddit use and the way you can mix/match pieces like normal avatars is key. It’s natural. I don’t have to get on a new platform to see my NFT or convince others to use this platform so that more people will see it, because this website is already massively popular. Thousands of people will see my Foustling Avatar whenever I comment or post as normal without me doing anything special. Is that the case with any other NFT?

Comparatively, BAYC, Moonbirds, CryptoPunks and other big projects are…. What? I know the meme is “just jpegs”. But they don’t have their own social media platforms that are relevant, and never will. No one would use a BYAC social media outside of BYAC holders. Sure, you can set the monke as your Twitter PFP, but then you’re on Twitter with a fucking gorilla for your public image while everyone else is a human being. Embarrassing. Here, we’re all already snoos and pseudoanonymous, so other than the blue diamond you don’t stick out like a sore thumb if you have one (and the free NFTs kinda negate the diamond too).

Ok, but what about NFTs with real “functionality” like in video games games? Well, if you’re on some Metavorse shit that run on NFTs, you have to convince the people around you that the platform is gonna blow up and be big and relevant someday, because let’s face it, right now no NFT game/metaverse really is. And what if it fails? Then your NFTs are useless. The same can be said of nearly any collectible NFT project other than this one. With these avatar NFTs, you don’t have to convince anyone that Reddit is relevant or big. It’s a given. Everyone knows what Reddit is, and it’s not going anywhere.

tl;dr These are simple, elegant NFTs that effortlessly integrate into what’s already one of the biggest websites and entertainment platforms on earth in a way that 1) is naturally visible to millions, 2) does not require that you change how you interact with the website, or 3) cause you to stick out like a sore thumb.

That’s why, imo, these sold like absolute gangbusters today despite being in a massive bear market and are here to stay.