gm ✌️
Everyone is super rich from the Arbitrum airdrop, right?
But who's still out there messing around with NFTs?
We are. And so are a whole bunch of other degens.
This week we're looking at:
Which NFT Communities Are The Most Active?
The NFT collections that survive and grow in reputation and floor price over time aren’t the ones with the most technical art or the most exciting mint process — it’s the ones with the strongest communities that thrive over time. But not every one of them is built to last. Which NFT communities are the strongest and most active currently, and why? What exactly is it about these top NFT collections that sets them apart from the rest, leading to the creation of some of the most tightly-knit communities on the internet? Let’s find out.
My NFT community is my family.
But first, here's a quick tutorial on how to be an upstanding NFT Degen for the uninitiated, or the super forgetful:
Step 1 is always "gm" — degens have manners
Step 2 is to pull up icy.tools, the best resource in the universe for discovering, tracking, and analyzing NFTs.
For the builders out there
Applications close EOD today — 3/24
QuickNode is hosting their third QuickPitch Competition for anyone building on the blockchain.
Spend 5 minutes of your time filling out an application, and if you get selected, 5 minutes of your time pitching on Twitter Spaces. Nothing more.
Apply by March 22nd, 2023, to win $10,000 in cash for your Web3 project, $25K of free QuickNode credits, $25K of free AWS credits, $20K of ad space on Icy.Tools, a social blast on our Twitter account with 23K+ followers, and an email to 110K+ developers.
Selected applicants will present on the QuickNode-hosted Twitter Spaces on March 28th, 2023!
$80,000 in prizes ✨
10 minutes of your time 🚀
3rd QuickPitch Competition ✅
Presented by QuickNode, @AWSstartups, and @dust_labs (creators of @DeGodsNFT@y00tsNFT)
Apply now -
Twitter Spaces on March 28th, 2023
— QuickNode (@QuickNode)
Mar 8, 2023
The most active NFT communities
BAYC Community
Sitting at #1 in the Inspect Collection Rankings, the BAYC NFT collection has not only one of the top all-time NFT trading volumes (1.1M ETH) and estimated market cap, it’s also got one of the best and most robust communities in the industry. With over 1M Twitter followers and a massive 47% community reach score (the amount of all NFT Twitter users who saw Tweets related to the collection in the past 24 hours), Yuga Labs’ creation clearly stands above the rest.
But how did they build this community? Through three main factors: networking, intriguing design, and continuous utility. From the very start, Yuga Labs leveraged other Twitter-based crypto communities to spread the word about the BAYC collection. They’ve also recruited several celebrities as owners, including Jimmy Fallon, Justin Bieber, and Eminem, and established partnerships with the likes of Adidas, Rolling Stone, and Timex. They’ve grown awareness for their collection through connections with credible, established brands and projects — making the BAYC brand something that people wanted to be part of from the very beginning.
The collection’s art, backstory, and worldbuilding also played a role in snowballing Yuga Labs’ creation into a larger-than-life community. The Bored Apes are all disillusioned billionaires who hang out in a yacht club in 2031. The iconic BAYC art style is instantly recognizable and has spawned countless copycat collections.
And finally, the seemingly endless utility that the collection has provided: from Bored Ape Kennel Club NFTs to the Dookey Dash game, Yuga Labs has consistently pumped out content and actual value for their holders, making headlines every time and drawing new members both to purchase NFTs and to interact with the community in other ways. Holders have also received Mutant Ape Serum NFTs and ApeCoin airdrops as well. Yuga has clearly set the standard for building NFT communities, and other brands have followed suit.
Azuki Community
Not far behind BAYC NFTs on the Inspect Collection Rankings at #4, the creators of Azuki are also very aware of the importance of vision and utility in driving organic community growth. The Discord channel has 111k members and its Twitter account has almost 340k followers. Since its original mint in early 2022, Azuki has become the biggest anime profile picture (PFP) collection out there — a worthy accomplishment, considering the sheer amount of NFTs that fall into that category.
The original mint price was 1 ETH per NFT, and the Dutch Auction mint sold out in four minutes flat, drawing the attention of the entire NFT and crypto world. After purchasing their Azuki NFT, owners were then given access to The Garden, “a corner of the internet where artists, builders, and web3 enthusiasts meet to create a decentralized future,” according to the collection’s homepage. Shortly after the mint, holders were airdropped “mysterious box” NFTs that ended up holding Beanz, a secondary collection that currently sits at a floor price of 1.4 ETH.
Success breeds success in the NFT space, and as Chiru Labs, the creators of the collection, have continued to announce plans and dreams for their collection, the hype (and the secondary sales) for Azuki has continued to grow, drawing collectors, anime fans, and investors all together in the same digital place.
The Proof Collective Community
This example is a bit different from the others in our list. Proof Collective is a members-only exclusive community that has launched some super-successful projects, including Moonbirds, Grails, and Oddities NFTs. Proof was created by Kevin Rose, co-founder of social news site Digg. Beginning as a community that formed naturally around the Proof Podcast, Rose took things a step farther by formalizing it into a group that stayed on the lookout for the next big thing in Web3 — until it became the next big thing itself.
In December 2021, Proof launched the PROOF Collective NFT series, which is comprised of 1,000 membership cards that grant access to the incredibly exclusive community. The floor price currently sits at almost 15 ETH, after minting nearly two and a half years ago at 5 ETH (which is incredibly high by most NFT mint standards). Holders are granted perks like early access to the Proof podcast, membership to the collectives Discord, free NFT drops, and in-person event invites — not to mention the pooled knowledge and experience that such a group of individuals will gather together.
With 104k Twitter followers and several extremely successful and popular NFT collections under its belt, Proof Collective is an example of extreme exclusivity creating hype and actually building a wider community of fans and holders of auxiliary NFTs (Moonbirds, Grails, etc).
Doodles Community
Minted at 0.123 ETH in October 2021 and sitting at a floor price of 4 ETH today (at one point 12 ETH!), Doodles are an extremely well established and popular NFT series— but what got them there, and why does the collection have a massive 24% Twitter community reach? It starts with their three creators. First, there’s the artist, Evan Keast, who was already a successful animator. Then, add the creators of the CryptoKitties collection Scott Martin and Jordan Castro to the team, and you have a recipe for hype and buzz within the NFT industry at large.
Then there’s the privileges that ownership of a Doodle provides. The utility is actually all community-focused by nature — holders are able to vote on projects, products, and events that are funded with the project’s $5M Doodlebank, the community’s treasury. One such event was held during Art Basel Miami in collaboration with The Heart Project (they named it “Heart Basel Miami”), which included live music, limited-edition merch, and more. The Doodles team also released “Space Doodles,” a 1:1 NFT release given to all holders of the original NFT. There are also plans in the works for Doodles 2, a second series that’s aimed at building a wider audience with a much larger collection.
Wrapping Up
There’s no real way to know if an NFT community will explode in growth from the very beginning of a collection’s release, but we can observe some common threads by looking at the past successes of incredibly successful projects. Building hype with networking and choosing the right team members is a huge benefit because it builds trust with fans and shows the level of quality a collection may have. Offering utility that’s continually evolving and changing (from events to free airdrops) is another key that the communities like BAYC and Azuki have grown and flourished with. And of course, although the most technical or artful designs don’t guarantee organic community growth, intentionally crafted NFT art is not lost on fans. All of these factors can come together to form an ideal environment for an NFT community to thrive in, and the collections we’ve listed here are prime examples.
We're all moving to El Salvador!
Joking...kinda
JUST IN: 🇸🇻 El Salvador President to eliminate all taxes on income, property, and capital gains for technology innovations.
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru)
Mar 24, 2023
Pack it up, boys. The AI memes are 🔥
Want to see something else from our newsletter, let us know! dm us on Twitter @icy_tools
And if you want to share this newsletter with a friend, that would be super duper! Just send them this link: