🐻 are bears okay?
The NFT community questions the well-being of bears.
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The Big Story
Everyone wants to know how the bears are doing.
Well, some are okay. Others are not.
Cool, but why the hell are we even talking about bears in the first place?
Because besides being cute and furry animals that we should discuss and appreciate anyway, they're also the top-trading collection on OpenSea.
Last month, Okay Bears, a profile picture collection spanning 10,000 unique avatars, was launched on Solana NFT marketplace Magic Eden. With a mint price of 1.5 SOL (about $146), the project quickly became the highest-selling NFT collection on Magic Eden and subsequently, on OpenSea, where secondary sales reached around $18.4 million within 24 hours post-launch.
In fact, the NFT collection was so hyped that it sold out on day 1.
Interestingly, it's also the first Solana NFT project that surpassed individual Ethereum projects in the 24-hour trading volume. For context, Ethereum-based collections like VeeFriends and Yuga Labs' recently-acquired Meebits made 4,565 ETH ($13.1 million) and 4,136 ETH ($11.9 million) in trading volumes during the same period.
Seeing the massive success of Okay Bears, several new projects have emerged since then that are essentially copycat versions. One such collection that has got many people’s attention is Not Okay Bears.
Launched on Ethereum because they're "not okay" on Solana, the collection consists of 10,000 cartoonish bear illustrations with a variety of randomized traits. What's so special about this, you ask? Instead of facing to the right, the bears in this collection face to the left.
While the first 1000 NFTs were free to mint, the rest were minted at 0.02 ETH (around $41) each. The project has been performing surprisingly well; its floor price went from 0.06 ETH to 0.279 ETH on OpenSea as of writing.
Some NFT enthusiasts claim it to be a charity project after the creators donated about 20% of the Bears mint funds (35.8 ETH, or $73,886) to the Mental Health Impact Index Fund through the crypto charity platform The Giving Block. Plus, according to their OpenSea bio, the creators have opted for zero royalties, which further reinforced the support for the project.
Currently, the Not Okay Bears project is doing more volume in a minute on Ethereum than Okay Bears is doing on Solana in an hour. While the latter hasn't commented on the issue, they did like a tweet that hinted at a possible action.
But Solana isn't new to derivative collections. Last year, spinoff versions of Ethereum-based NFT collections such as CryptoPunks and Pudgy Penguins surfaced on Solana and made huge gains.
That said, the Okay Bears-Not Okay Bears situation has once again sparked the Ethereum-Solana debate within the NFT community. While some consider Solana a "less mature" ecosystem than Ethereum, the data shows that it's quickly catching up.
In fact, all metrics for Magic Eden have been trending higher for the last three months, while OpenSea's data shows the opposite picture.
For a while now, Solana has been gunning for Ethereum's NFT crown. And it's making some great strides. According to CryptoSlam, Solana NFT trading saw a 57% to $12.4 million in the last 24 hours, while Ethereum NFT trading fell 22% to $21 million during the same period.
All this leads us to one key question: Will everyone capitulate to Solana NFTs? Well, the support for such a change remains high, but it seems unlikely. While Solana’s projects have more use cases in the growing crypto market, it still needs to sort out some technical issues. And with Ethereum 2.0 on the way, its transaction processing capacity would improve dramatically, which will only push the price higher than Solana.
But till then, whatever happens, the hope of WAGBO (we're all gonna be okay) prevails.
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