What Makes an NFT Project Worthwhile?

Table of Links

1 Introduction

2 State of Art

3 Projects Selection and Data Collection

3.1 Blockchain data

3.2 Twitter data

4 Data Analysis and Results

4.1 Ethereum wallets and Twitter users and 4.2 The communities

4.3 Hashtags

4.4 The role of the social network community

5 Conclusions and References

3 PROJECTS SELECTION AND DATA COLLECTION

For this study, we selected 18 different profile picture NFTs projects that, following our experience in the !eld, we found to be significant each one for a specific reason. These projects are illustrated in Table 1 where reported for each one are: the publishing date of the smart contract on the blockchain (also called deployment date), the Ethereum address of the smart contract, the official Twitter account, and the list of hashtags that we identified as the ones most used by the respective Twitter community. CryptoPunks (Figure 1a) are commonly regarded as the originators of PFP projects: they were launched in June 2017 and consist of 10,000 punks that are all different and pixelized. The community is predominantly composed of people who have been in the crypto scene for a long time (referred to in the crypto slang as OGs). We included The HashMasks (Figure 1b), while considered more fine-art than PFP, because they are a prototypical collection launched just before the so-called NFT bull run of 2021-2022. This collection introduced the centrality of the concept of traits and rarity in each image. This concept was then the basis for all the projects we analyzed in this paper. We considered projects that became very famous such as the Bored Ape Yacht Club (Figure 1c), further referred as BAYC that are now considered as a status symbol, projects that were born in the same period such as the Crypto Hodlers (Figure 1f) that struggled to expand their social community, projects like the mfers (Figure 1p), created by a long-time crypto investor and Twitter influencer Sartoshi, that has been the forerunner of the usage of the CC0 license and meme culture. In general, we tried to enclose in this selection all those projects that introduced specific innovations or because their overall volume of tweets and transactions is representative for the study. It is important to point out that this list does not represent any kind of financial advice in any way.