Newsletter #44
Newsletter #44
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How do you decide which NFTs to collect?
It’s a simple question that reveals everything about your approach. Do you collect the “blue chips”—the NFTs that have had the highest prices historically—or do you prefer to discover emerging artists? Are you interested in the NFTs that demonstrate technical prowess? Artistic authenticity? Or are you pursuing a different strategy?
In this week’s, Lazy newsletter we will explore the “Historical NFT” strategy.
Collectors who pursue the Historical NFT strategy are akin to archaeologists of the blockchain.
It’s an apt metaphor: the blockchain is an ever increasing permanent record of everything that happens on-chain. That means every event—from the creation of an NFT to its sale—is recorded forever. And with the right tools and patient sleuthing, forgotten NFTs can become like fossils: valuable when rediscovered.
Historical NFTs can be divided into roughly two eras: those created before January 2018, when the ERC721 standard was established, and those created after.
NFTs that were created before the ERC721 standard need to be wrapped in a new contract in order to be sold on NFT marketplaces. A good example of this is MoonCats, an NFT project created in 2017 that was rediscovered in March 2021, and is now traded on marketplaces in a wrapped form.
The basic historical NFT strategy is to find and collect pre-ERC721 NFTs. Another option is to collect glitches or mistakes. For example, when CryptoPunks were first created by LarvaLabs there was an error in the smart contract. The creators discovered the mistake after minting had begun, quickly fixed the problem, and resumed minting on a different smart contract. The second smart contract is the officially sanctioned version of CryptoPunks. But that hasn’t stopped people from trading so-called “v1 CrytoPunks,” which are the NFTs created by the first smart contract, much to the ire of LarvaLabs.
So how has the Historical NFT strategy fared? The sentiment in the NFT community seems mixed. While some collectors think the Historical NFT narrative is running out of steam, others continue to scour the earliest transactions on the blockchain, hoping to find valuable NFT fossils.
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