Just a few hundred NFTs from the 3,650-piece collection have been sold.
Paper Boyz NFT, which debuted on July 15, is a popular NFT on social media over the past few months and has blown up recently rather fast. Despite gaining a huge social media following and a discord nearing 75,000 members, their official Paper Boyz collection did not sell out.
With the cryptocurrency market in a slump, many new collections can’t thrive unless they’re free or cheaper than cheap. Paid NFTs in this market are not like they were in 2021.
Paid NFTs in this market are not like they were in 2021. By releasing the collection at around $500 in ETH, JetSet, JoeySendz, and TheBlondeJon and the Paper Boyz team have narrowed down their potential market. This is down from the original mint price of $1800 however the price of ether has dropped nearly 70% since the team started marketing Paper Boyz. New collections with similar utility are released for $3,000 to $10,000. with the last big ones being VeeFriends and Moon Birds NFT.
Paid mints have generally not been going well for most projects, and the free mints meta has taken over ever since GoblinTown.wtf went viral for making weird gargoyle sounds on a viral twitter space. It seems the market doesn’t care much for utility or roadmaps anymore and is just distracted trying to get rich off of free mints that have no reason to be bought besides the possibility of flipping them for a profit because of the hype. The only way to make money with free mints is to get lucky and hope the secondary sales take off to get paid royalties.
Paper Boyz was marketed as a traditional product with business events and a premium discord channel, but was sold as an NFT. Paper Boyz shows NFTs aren’t ready to be used to authenticate product ownership. Right now, most people assume NFTs are just jpegs or other digital files that hold no value besides what people are willing to pay, so when they see an NFT they want it to be priced in reference to the rest of the market just because it is a “NFT,” often disregarding the true value of the utility and the NFT’s purpose for being sold in the first place.
NFTs may be here to stay, but the crypto winter is revealing that utility or roadmaps do not guarantee success. Right now, NFT project success is due to hype, influencer shilling, luck, and timing. Unfortunately, the NFT market is mostly populated by people interested in flipping NFTs to get rich. It may work during a crypto bull run when people are willing to spend money on anything that sounds revolutionary, but it is still a foreign concept to the majority of the world.
If this was a year ago, the Paper Boyz NFT project would have sold out instantly just like their previous collections, but at the end of the day, a lot of projects with a fraction of the utility promised by holding a Paper Boyz NFT were able to sell out. It doesn’t matter how big your community is or how much money you spend on marketing your NFT, in the crypto winter, people just aren’t willing to spend money on NFTs especially if the NFT only gives them access to normal products and services that could of just been paid for in fiat. The NFT market is the wild wild west and people just want free mints while hoping to get rich, and if that’s not your NFT project right now, it’s going to be a painful learning lesson.
The Paper Boyz NFT team stated that everything with the project remains the same besides the number of people who have access to their utility and will now focus on building out NFTMagazine.com as originally stated.
