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How to Find 'Blue-Chip NFTs'? Eight Key Factors to Consider

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Future NFT projects are likely to need to meet most of the conditions listed in this article in order to stand out and become a blue-chip.

Original Article Title: " Eight Qualities NFT Blue-Chip Should Have "

Original Source: The DeFi Way

For an NFT newbie like myself, "Blue-Chip NFTs" may be the most suitable entry point into the metaverse.

The question then is, which NFTs fall under the blue-chip category? Are they the ones with a particularly high floor price? Or ones with particularly high liquidity?

And the next natural question is, what qualities should the potential NFT blue-chips possess?

In this article, I attempt to give myself an answer, and if there are any significant errors in the text, please feel free to point them out.

Note: Currently, the vast majority of the trading volume in the NFT space occurs on OpenSea, and the author has only compared the projects and data listed on OpenSea, so the discussion in this article about NFT blue-chips may not be comprehensive.

(Note: Image from adventtr, provided by Getty Images)

Criteria for Evaluating NFT Blue-Chips

Currently on OpenSea, NFT projects can be ranked based on Volume, Floor Price, and Owners. Subjectively, the author believes that for an NFT project to be considered a blue-chip, it should have at least 2 metrics in the top 20.

Let's briefly explain the reason: in most people's minds, the floor price of a blue-chip NFT is very high. For example, the bored ape avatar's floor price exceeds 100 ETH, which has clearly become one of the characteristics of blue-chip NFT projects.

As the second important metric, total volume represents how liquid the NFT project's history is, and the liquidity of blue-chip NFTs naturally needs to be high.

The number of unique addresses held as the third key metric can be seen as an application of Metcalfe's Law (the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users). However, for a cryptocurrency network, the value of each node (or user) is highly variable. In the NFT space, one viewpoint that the author strongly agrees with is: NFT holders determine the IP ceiling. This means that (1) the more well-known a holder is, the more value they can bring to the NFT network, and (2) the more holders there are, the greater the overall value of the NFT network. Since it's challenging to determine the identities of holders, a simple count of addresses is used here as a vague measure (Note: For a more in-depth and accurate analysis, identifying prominent individuals holding these NFTs would be necessary).

Relying on just one metric to classify a project as blue-chip is quite unreasonable. For example, some generative art floor prices rank highly, but their trading volumes and number of holders are relatively small.

Top 20 User Address Count

(Note: Data from OpenSea)

When sorted by user address count, we can observe that NFT platforms, NFT games, and NFT land are prominent in the data. However, since collectibles and NFT games involve a wide variety of items, with a significant disparity in the quantity of each item, the floor prices of such projects are very low. For most users, such NFT projects also fall into the easily overlooked blue-chip category.

As for NFT avatar projects with very limited total supply, their address count ranking is generally not high. Some NFT avatar projects choose to break through this limitation by airdropping derivatives, thereby raising the network's value ceiling.

Floor Price TOP 20

(Note: Data from OpenSea)

For most NFT players, floor price is the most intuitive blue-chip indicator. Currently, the minimum threshold for the top 20 projects has reached 6.3 ETH, with a significant portion being NFT avatar projects. Possible factors include:

1. Avatar projects have a very limited total supply, making it easy to drive up the floor price;

2. As we are currently entering the Metaverse, we first need to go through an avatar, and avatar-based NFTs fall into this category, making it easier to tell a story;

3. Punks and Bored Apes successively pushed up the ceiling of avatar (avatar-based) NFT projects, setting a leading example;

Total Trading Volume TOP 20

(Note: Data from opensea)

For NFT projects, the total trading volume is also a very important liquidity metric, and among the top 20 projects in this metric, we still see that avatar (avatar-based) NFT projects account for the vast majority, followed by NFT games, NFT collectibles, and NFT land.

The overlap between NFT games and NFT land category projects is actually very high, which is also easy to understand. If we compare a certain NFT game to a planet in the Metaverse, it will inevitably involve elements such as land, avatars, etc.

NFT Blue Chip Category and Related Projects

Avatar (Avatar-based) Blue Chip

1. Bored Ape Yacht Club (Floor Market Value 1.05M ETH, Floor Price #2, Total Trading Volume #2)

2. CryptoPunks (Floor Market Value 654K ETH, Floor Price #3, Total Trading Volume #1)

3. Mutant Ape Yacht Club (Floor Market Value 497K ETH, Address Count #12, Floor Price #8, Total Trading Volume #3)

4. CLONE X - X TAKASHI MURAKAMI (Floor Market Value 355.2K ETH, Address Count #20, Floor Price #10, Total Trading Volume #7)

5. Azuki (Floor Market Value 225K ETH, Floor Price #9, Total Trading Volume #6)

6. Doodles (Floor Market Value 146.9K ETH, Floor Price #11, Total Trading Volume #9)

7. World of Women (Floor Market Value 83.8K ETH, Floor Price #15, Total Trading Volume #20)

8. Cool Cats NFT (Floor Market Cap 8.25K ETH, Floor Price #16, Total Trading Volume #12)

NFT Land Blue Chips

1. The Sandbox (Floor Market Cap 30.45K ETH Address Count #9 Total Trading Volume #8)

2. Decentraland (Floor Market Cap 27.66K ETH Address Count #15 Total Trading Volume #5)

3. Bored Ape's upcoming "Otherside" (Floor Market Cap?)

Note: The influence of Bored Ape's IP is significant, so it is personally speculated that it has already secured a blue-chip status in the land category.

NFT Art Collection Blue Chips

1. Art Blocks

2. Rarible

Currently, only these 2 projects meet the standards of NFT art collection blue chips, and this category is also the most difficult to understand at the moment, not quite suitable for an NFT newbie like the author.

NFT Gaming Blue Chips (Tokens)

1. Axie Infinity (AXS Token Circulating Market Cap $36.85 Billion)

2. Decentraland (MANA Token Circulating Market Cap $34 Billion)

3. The Sandbox (SAND Token Circulating Market Cap $33 Billion)

4. Bored Ape ApeCoin (APE Token Circulating Market Cap $31.1 Billion)

5. Dapper Labs' Flow (FLOW Token Circulating Market Cap $21.27 Billion)

6. Town Star - Gala (GALA Token Circulating Market Cap $16.11 Billion)

In addition to the above-listed NFT gaming blue-chip projects with issued tokens, among the gaming projects currently on the leaderboard, Parallel Alpha and Sorare have not yet issued tokens. Both of these projects have also received massive funding from well-known VC firms, so they are also likely to join the ranks of NFT gaming blue chips in the future.

(Note: Gaming projects typically follow a platformization route, and may even launch their own public chain, with these projects currently having the highest potential ceiling)

What Qualities Should an NFT Blue-Chip Project Possess?

By observing the approaches taken by current NFT projects, the author has summarized some methods that can help increase the IP awareness of NFT projects.

1. Increase influence through gifting to celebrities (representative of project Bored Ape Yacht Club, for example, Jay Chou and JJ Lin's NFTs were gifts from Huang Licheng)

2. Airdrop derivative works to NFT holders (representative of projects Bored Ape Yacht Club, CLONE X - X TAKASHI MURAKAMI, Azuki)

3. Airdrop tokens to NFT holders (representative of project Bored Ape Yacht Club)

4. Launch NFT games and NFT land (representative of project Bored Ape Yacht Club)

5. Collaborate with major IPs or merge (representative of projects Bored Ape Yacht Club and CLONE X - X TAKASHI MURAKAMI, after RTFKT was acquired by NIKE, it enhanced its brand influence, and Yuga Labs also significantly strengthened its brand influence after acquiring CryptoPunks and Meebits)

6. Produce film and television works for project IP (representative of project Parallel, Parallel partnered with Superconductor, the latter was founded by "Avengers" directors Russo Brothers and "Fast & Furious" director Justin Lin)

7. Launch your own public chain (representative of projects Axie Infinity and Flow)

8. Airdrop or release derivative music NFTs (currently no representative projects seen)

Of course, besides the NFT projects that have already taken these measures, theoretically, all NFT projects can use the above methods, depending on the project team's operational capabilities. Among them, 2, 3, and 4 may be achievable by most project teams, while 1, 5, 6, and 7 test the team's resources, and the effect of 8 is currently unknown.

In conclusion, the author believes that in the future, NFT projects will likely need to meet most of the above conditions to stand out and become blue-chip.

What do you think?